I think it is official: Kara LOVES her art class! What? You didn't hear? Yeah, Kara is taking art lessons for two weeks this summer. She is one of about six other girls being taught by a middle-school art teacher named Ms. Rita. The class meets in a plantation house in an upstairs room that is altogether art. Ms. Rita has schooled her pupils in landscape, in warm and cool colors, and in the difference between fore-, middle-, and background. I'm sure they've covered more, but it isn't always easy to pull information from Kara by the time I get home. You can already see the effects in the drawing and coloring she is doing at home in her room.
Caleb is screetching. You know that stage that kids go through where they just screetch? Awful, isn't it? L. calls me at work and I can barely hear her over the squeek, shreik, eeek.
L and I sat up last night until midnight. She was scrapbooking and I played guitar for awhile and then just talked. Kara has been listening to an instrumental CD of acoustic Christmas music lately. It seems strange, I guess, but it is really very pretty. Hearing snatches of it gets those advent hymns going in my head, and I was thinking last night about the value of "owned" hymnody.
How many hymns can you sing full out? I can stumble through a few. With the change to the Anglican tradition, the hymn tradition changed as well. Gone are many of the "Would you be free of your burden of sin?" camp-meeting era songs of the second great awakening. They've been replaced by a, frankly, richer fare--some of the hymns going back as far as the Church Fathers. But, though of better quality, it is still a strange soup.
I pulled the guitar out last night just to pick my way through a number of the hymns set aside for use during vespers, and discovered a nice setting of "O Glorious Light." The problem with hymns is, in many cases, they are set in the most boring quarter note common time sort of way. Or they have no time setting or key signature and resemble open-ended medieval plainchant. How does one make sense of that?
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