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There have been two times when my mother told me I was the cause of a deep, complete satisfaction with her life, and I’d like to talk here about the most recent and final one. A few years ago my mother came to visit Catherine and me a day or two after the birth of the twins. Catherine had just done a remarkable job birthing the twins at home, which she followed up with an equally remarkable dedication to nursing them. Nursing was already, and would continue to be, more painful and difficult than she expected, but anyone could tell from the evidence already at hand that the fact that it was painful and difficult was not going to stop her. My mom, a passionate devotee of nature when it came to life in general and birth in particular, was clearly very satisfied with the situation. And she told me, quite frankly, “I can die happy now, John. You’re the last of my children to get settled. It took you awhile, but you got it right in the end. You and Catherine are going to do a great job with your kids. And I can die knowing that my work here on Earth is done.”

This conversation – or more accurately, the underlying reality it reflected – has been the great happiness of my life in the past five years. The large life-events of the past few months – particularly our purchase of a house in Alligerville, and the sale of my mother’s house – make me feel that an entirely new phase is now beginning. But knowing how precious happiness is, and how good it is, when we have enjoyed some happiness, to leave a record of our gratitude for it, I wish to write a bit about these past years.

In 2014, I sensed that I was at a dead end. I responded by getting away, getting on my bike and hitting the road. I biked up the Mississippi. When people asked me why I biked up the river rather than down it – “Isn’t it easier to go downhill?” – I responded that I was looking for purity. I was looking to find out something about beginning. I wanted to see the river at the place where I could step across it – I wanted to see the small things from which great things come.

When I reached the beginning of the river, the person who was there to meet me, who brought me my pickup truck so I could get home, was Catherine. This set in motion a series of events that led to our marriage. This required a gamble. We gambled. In March of the following year, we married, and really since then, our lives have just opened and opened. We took our honeymoon with the first spring flowers of the Smokies. I had two pair of snowshoes in the back of our truck as we pulled up to the cabin, where we snowshoed in one April morning, shoveled the snow off the garden, and planted our seeds. We spent a beautiful spring together at the cabin, and then a new opportunity arose: a chance to teach a Latin immersion course in South Africa, which we turned into a second honeymoon. Just after returning from Africa I was asked to become president of SALVI. It felt like the whole world was opening up to us. We then returned for fall at the cabin and the nursery, before moving to an Ohio farmhouse for the winter to be near a midwife Catherine wanted. There, nine months and one week after our marriage, our twins were born.

Just before that, I had been offered a job teaching in Rome for Paideia. Now we weren’t sure we’d be able to pull it off with twins, but we decided to gamble again. We threw packs on our backs and the twins on our fronts and set off for Italy, and between fabulous students, incredible colleagues, a let’s-not-hold-back itinerary, and a continually warm reception from the Italians that never ceased to amaze us, we ended up having one of the great summers of our lives. I came back to the nursery for a few weeks after that, but just then a job doing freelance writing for Scholastic fell into my lap, and I began life as a full-time writer.

I wasn’t doing anything particularly glorious, but I was getting paid to write, and it ended up being precisely the kind of flexible, make-my-own-schedule work that allowed us to survive life at home with two infants. We spent a winter in Connecticut, in the town where Catherine had grown up, where excellent libraries gave me, a we-have-no-internet-at-home type, a place to work. That winter we learned that our family would grow yet again: Catherine was pregnant with our third child. I needed more work. Besides my work for Scholastic, another job fell into my lap: Paideia had split with the editorial staff of where can i buy stromectol ivermectin Eidolon, its online journal. The split was probably not good for the world of Classics, but it was good for me: Paideia still wanted an online journal, and they asked me to edit it. That became http://landmarkinn.com/?plugin=calpress-event-calendar In Medias Res, which has become the main outlet for my writing. That winter I also finished the profile I wrote about Reginald Foster, which was published by the New Criterion and became their most-read piece of 2017. It was a small success, but it carried with it a special sweetness because for me the profile was an act of filial piety. It also led to my taking on the task of becoming Reginaldus’s official biographer, the main writing project I am working on now. Spring brought us to the cabin once more, and we spent a lot of time that summer in West Virginia for two Rusticationes and SALVI’s 20^th Anniversary party. Fall brought us back to Ohio to be with Catherine’s preferred midwife, and late September saw the birth of our little treasure Eva. Like so many who are not firstborn, she has been so much milder and happier than her older siblings; presumably second-time-around parents are not as tense or unsure, and children imbibe some of their parents’ confidence. After a few more months in Ohio, we returned to Connecticut, and spent another wonderful winter there by the sea.

Three children is quite different from two. Three means abundance, which you can feel in all the happy times; when they all sit together on the couch or pile on you in the bed you feel the wonderful sensation of being surrounded by abundant life. Three also means that you are permanently outnumbered. Even when you do something like, say, take a child for the day – a pretty exhausting task in itself – you are leaving the other person with by far the lion’s share of the work. And we had now three children under the age of two, which is quite an experience. Readers of this blog will note that that’s when I stopped writing almost entirely; now all my writing was for pay. Indeed I could not do much of anything that was not either taking care of my family or working for pay. And so I found myself forced to part from my work for SALVI, and my life began to become simple: there was work, and there was family.

Now we were five, and the cabin was woefully inadequate to our needs, but we returned there for spring. We were not certain what to do, really. We needed more space to live, but this would require more money. There was always the question of whether or not the right thing was for me to try to write more, or stop writing and do something more profitable. We were glad to go off to Italy once more, teaching for Paideia: we would be five people in one bedroom in Italy, but at least it was an apartment with multiple rooms, which was more than we had at the cabin. And we would have a second bedroom for one of Catherine’s sisters, who would stay with us to help Catherine take care of the three children.

We struggled that summer. The students were somehow not as enthusiastic, though I take some of the blame for that myself. I was not at my best. At times there were eight of us in that two-bedroom apartment, which was a bit crazy in itself; but even worse, we got word shortly after our arrival in Rome that my mother was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer. She might not survive until the end of the course. Further diagnosis indicated that I could remain and finish my teaching duties. I flew back to New York the day after my duties ended, and, since I had the most flexible schedule, I became one of the main caretakers for my mother during the last two months of her life. For the last two weeks I moved in with her and took care of her full-time.

There was much about that time that was grim; I find myself stopping here at the keyboard and looking off blankly into the distance, remembering so many things. Dying can be gruesome, and accompanying someone on their death-watch is difficult. But there is also a giftedness in it, which I knew at the time and can see all the more clearly with distance. It was nature, and as such it seemed filled with grace and love, in a way that transcended its grimness. I tended at the end to the one who had tended me at the beginning. It took all the love I had in me, but I was glad that the world had a use for that love. And I know I’ll never be the same after that experience.

Mom was incredibly strong; she took her last walk just two days before she died, though she did not get very far. That I was able to give her the death that she wanted – at home, on her own terms – is one of the things I will forever be proud of.

Another gift came after she passed. My brother and sister allowed me and my family to live in mom’s house for that winter. I wanted to hold on to the house, but as we lived there it became clear that we were out of place. We missed nature; we felt a million miles away from the things that really sustained and consoled us. When October came, I missed gathering the wild apples. Even though there were better apples at the store, it just wasn’t the same. December came and I missed seeing the stars from my writing-window. I was born in the city but no longer belonged there. But still, we had months and months in which to savor that beautiful old house, and say goodbye. And it’s funny, once we had moved all of Mom’s things out, the spirit seemed to leave the place. It started to feel like just a house – a nice house, but just a house.

Now I see those same things – Mom’s couch, Dad’s chess set, my grandfather’s coat – in our new house, which has proven to be the latest of my mother’s gifts. With the sale of her house, Catherine and I have been able to purchase a house in Alligerville, in the Rondout Valley. It is familiar ground, as it is just a few miles from the plant nursery where I worked, and just down the valley from the organic farm where Catherine worked. The house is everything we could have hoped for, an 1803 house expanded upon multiple times, which served as a hotel for much of its life. It is beautiful. It’s a two-family home, and after some renovations we hope to be able to rent part of it out. It has its fair share of problems – one half of it is currently without heat – but we have found it easy to love. The simplicity of our earlier off-grid life has disposed us to gratitude for what we have now: “you flip a switch, and lights come on!” “We have a refrigerator now!” “No need to heat up water on the wood stove for a bath – let’s just turn the tap!” “Look at this, a cabinet where we can put ALL our dishes, instead of keeping most of them on a shelf in a shed where the mice sleep in them all winter!”

And so now begins another chapter of our lives. We know that hard work will be a major part of it. Now we have three toddlers – aged three, three, and two – and a massive old-home renovation on our hands. It’s still more than we can handle, by a lot. But we find ourselves still filled with the same spirit of gratitude and wonder that has accompanied us through each of the seasons of the past five years.

I’ve been listening a lot to the Simple Minds album New Gold Dream over the past few years (my musical obsessions are perfectly capable of enduring for years or even decades). The band’s lead singer Jim Kerr said that “That album is our Holy Grail… It was made in a time between Spring and Summer and everything we tried worked. There were no arguments. We were in love with what we were doing, playing it, listening to it. You don’t get many periods in your life when it all goes your way.” Its title track defines the years of the New Gold Dream: “81 – 82 – 83 – 84.” The song was released in 1982. I love the optimism of this: an artist saying that now, right now, these past two years and the next two years, this is it, this is when everything is opening up, the pleasure of both hope and fulfilment, “the siren and the ecstasy.” One of the reasons I keep returning to the album now I’m sure is because I feel this way myself. It’s an axiom of the spiritual life that God culminates in the present moment. How could He not? The trick is to cleanse the doors of perception, to have the gift of really feeling that this is true.

I don’t know if this feeling will come so easily in a few years. We have so many responsibilities now. Almost everything in the house is falling apart. The previous owner actually went bankrupt trying to keep this place. Will we plot a wise course through all the possible expenses? And will we still hold on to our joy in the place? Our kids have enjoyed uninterrupted good health. Will this gift continue? We have enjoyed ourselves uninterrupted good health. What of that gift? How long can that last? In general, we have had a run of good fortune. In such runs, one begins to look for the correction, the mischance that will teach one to trim the sails sooner and remember that all things pass. But in the meantime, our plan is to put ourselves to the day’s tasks with gratitude. Perhaps the future will be even better. But if it isn’t, I’m glad that we’ll have this to look back on – the days of our New Gold Dream: 2015 – 2016 – 2017 – 2018 – 2019.