Synopsis
It’s here! Finally! The missing slice of life readers crave. Rather than a parting nod to the happily-ever-after, an abiding love brightens this story from beginning to end.
Who is Michael’s gentle wife?
You see her on the cover giving Baby a kiss. She’s Carol, and Michael Weaver adores her.
It’s 1937. Unique to Christian fiction, marriage and motherhood take the spotlight. Carol is the main character. She and Michael are two imperfect people, married 12 years. Through episodes of tenderness, patience, joy, and conversational sweet humor, you’ll find that they share a deeper love than that of a courting couple.
What’s their secret?
Carol and Michael have a mature faith in Christ. Their love fills the house and spirals outward with a roll-up-your-sleeves compassion for others.
“How can I bless readers?” guided every hour the author spent at her desk—or at the kitchen sink—dreaming up this one-of-a-kind, full-length novel. She took on the challenge to show what an educational life looks like. The Weavers are a bookish family. They have no convenient curriculum to follow. Even so, home-style learning feels right to them. In soft strokes, the author blends into the action (and plot surprises) a sampling of:
- family worship/fellowship,
- good books/poetry/music/art,
- manners/chores/crafts,
- nature, play.
Yes, Carol and Michael are busy bringing up their children: Donald (10), Emily (8), and Baby Eliot (born in January). In chapter one it’s March, the close of a long, cold New England winter with tired Carol up at night, caring for her hungry, crying newborn. Snow is melting and the woods ring with robin songs. Life, however, isn’t all tea and roses. When trouble knocks on the door, the Weavers handle it with needed grace.
No edge-of-your-seat torments propel these pages. Here is a writing style of literary refreshment—a Mother Culture® comfort read—with characters you'd be happy to call friends. The aim of author Karen Andreola’s pen is to inspire as well as entertain, to allow a reader to hear herself think. May they be lovely thoughts that linger.
Karen’s writing motto is a line by minister JC Ryle. “Resolve that, by the grace of God, you will make Christianity beautiful in the eyes of the world.” Psalm 29:2
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About the Author
Karen Andreola is a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her interests are reading aloud to children, nature walks, knitting, quilting, cross-stitch, listening to a good sermon, church history, writing paper letters, corny old-fashioned music, and organic fair-trade chocolate. She is best known for her groundbreaking non-fiction Mother Culture® and A Charlotte Mason Companion.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One of Michael's Gentle Wife: A Family Love Story by Karen Andreola
Michael’s Wife
At the first little sounds of my baby stirring, I opened my eyes. The whimper elevated to a cry. Once more, I sat up in bed and lit the oil lamp. With the tips of my toes, I felt along the cold wood floor for my slippers and pulled on the sleeves of my robe. I’d grown accustomed to the dark. I was up in it, night after night. Across the ages of time, such has been the way of mothers and hungry babies.
Baby Eliot had been born in January; a little person of scarcely more than five pounds. His father and I had named him after the 17th-century New England preacher to the Indians, John Eliot. In the middle of his crying, Eliot paused to take a breath the instant I lifted him out of his crib. Oh to be lifted in the air, and then held in a parent’s loving embrace. It might be the most comforting experience in the whole of one’s lifetime. One day God’s children will meet Jesus in the air. All we will know is joy. We will be free of tears, sin and sorrow, pain, fear, hunger, cold, dark clouds, and loneliness.
These thoughts surfaced in March, at the end of a long cold New England winter. I comforted myself with them as I held my baby close. I’d already been up with Eliot before and after midnight. Now it was half past four in the morning, and I was drowsy from a lack of sleep. I might catch a wink before daybreak. Eliot was wet and changing him was not to his liking. He heightened his show of disapproval by crying as if he were afraid of not being fed at all, or ever again. I worked swiftly in low light, confidently skilled with the safety pins. Across the landing, Eliot’s brother and sister slept soundly. Their father, Michael Weaver, was asleep in an adjacent bedroom. Upon our decision to move into this big old house, Michael had arranged for electricity and bathrooms to be installed with our savings although these amenities were not yet the norm for the village of Appleton. It was 1937 and most of the countryfolk outside the village still lived without them. In my efforts to keep Eliot sleepy, I was in the habit of using the soft light of the oil lamp rather than switching on a light bulb.
“There, there,” I cooed, breaking my vow of nighttime silence. Eliot was my first baby to be exceptionally hungry. “Hush now. It’s all right. It’s okay. Mommy’s here.” A bit of advice had worked well with my first babies: to change, feed, rock, cuddle, or give any other soothing gesture at night, but to avoid familiarizing a baby with nighttime chatter. “And save the singing of lullabies for naptime or the close of a day. Never midnight,” was my mother’s helpful hint. This advice had worked before. But as I was seeing so little success with it this time around with Eliot, I’d been letting the rule slide. It no longer mattered.
Although being changed out of wet clothes in the cold of a March night provoked Eliot to cry at a high pitch, soon he was quieted and reassured in my arms. Together we were cozy with the warmth of nursing under layers of dry clothes. I stroked his little arm through his flannel blanket. If I searched the world over, I would not find a more beautiful baby. Eliot’s thick tuft of straight brown hair and his brown eyes were inherited from his Welsh-born father. My hair and eyes were a lighter shade. “Fawn at dawn,” Michael had described the color shortly after we’d married. Was that really twelve years ago?
All was calm, when on the other side of the blue curtains, the love call of an owl perched on a nearby tree broke the silence. Its cry was as clear as ice crystals and belonged to the cold night air. It sounded optimistic, perhaps because I had another cry to compare it to. It told me, “I’ve caught a mouse. Spring is here. If you’d be my love all will be right in the world.”
The click of the door latch got my attention next. The rocking chair faced the fireplace and the door to the left of it opened slowly, squeaking on a hinge. Michael, in his camel-colored robe, closed the door just as slowly. Even in a robe and in an obvious state of beard stubble, he fit the part of lord-of-the-manor.
“Hello… How are you?” he spoke in a low tone. “Hmm, another hinge. I must remember to oil that.”
His address was formal. That was Michael’s way. He’d been brought up by well-to-do parents with “manners maketh man” and lived by the principle that love engenders politeness. His parents had set their sights on him becoming a minister, doctor, or lawyer. Michael had chosen, in spite of their disapproval, to leave Wales to become an American businessman.
“What are you doing up at this hour?” I asked, as he walked into the room. “Sorry Eliot was loud,” I said more politely.
It was no surprise to me that Michael was awake. What was surprising was that he was up and entering the Blue Room. For ten weeks I’d been sleeping here, in the same bedroom I’d used as my birthing room, caring for Baby Eliot by myself in the middle of the night. Michael and I needn’t both be burning the midnight oil.
“Was he up earlier? I didn’t hear him.”
This Michael communicated brightly, although he must have been looking forward to the day when our son decreased his number of nightly feedings. I nodded my yes, and he nodded back, acknowledging this baby’s frequent hunger. He bent down to add a small log and piece of coal to the dying fire. The raking of the ashes back and forth enlivened the embers to an orange glow. With the rake and fireplace screen returned to their places, he looked me in the eyes. He had something personal he wanted to say. I could tell by the position of his dark eyebrows. Michael wasn’t aware of it, but their inner corners arched into a shallow U, one thick brow raised slightly higher than the other.
“Carol, darling, I miss you.”
A twinge of apprehension swept over me. “I miss you” was meant to be an endearment. But in my weariness my eyebrows probably matched his, for at that moment, rooted in the rocking chair, I faced an uncomfortable truth. I felt frumpy. And worse, I felt strangely out of practice being Michael’s wife. I hadn’t experienced this with the birth of our other babies. They had weighed in at a good eight pounds. They’d slept better. So had I. So had Michael.
Reading my face again, Michael knew I didn’t want to talk about it. And that was okay with him. “Sweet dreams to you both,” he said, and this lonely man left the Blue Room as he’d entered it, with another squeak of the door and click of the thumb latch.
“Sweet dreams” was an unusual phrase to be hearing at five o’clock in the morning. It made me smile. “Your father doesn’t know when he’s being funny,” I said to Eliot as I rocked him. Filled with warm milk, he was content. “Daddy’s mostly a serious man. You’ll grow to like him, my cutie pie, when you get to know him better. You’ll see.”
I laid Eliot in his crib and swaddled him in his flannels. He floated on a peaceful sea of slumber with a baby’s-breath-of-a-sigh and a flutter of tiny lashes. “Yes, sweet dreams,” I said softly as much to myself as to him. “Sweet dreams are also good for mommies.” I turned off the oil lamp, got back in bed, and squeezed my eyes shut determined to get an hour of sleep.
But my eyes wouldn’t stay shut. The fire was too much aglow. Buried under blankets, I shivered, waiting for the sheets to warm, composing myself while the firelight flickered on the wall. It was sunlight I wanted. Not firelight. Tired of gray skies, I craved blue skies, friends, flowers, bird songs, yellow butterflies, juicy ripe strawberries, and going barefoot with the children again on green grass. I was dreaming in color with my eyes open. Does Michael know it’s sweet dreams that uplift a mother in her daily tasks and give rise to hope? Hmm, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “that perches in the soul. And sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.” Was Miss Dickinson influenced by an owl’s feathers and an owl’s call, at the end of her New England winter on the first day of spring?
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