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The End of March 

Sally Thomas

Stands of bearded iris, purple in mourningSpring up, early, among their cool green speartips,Pale and pointed, palmlike, though no one’s picked them,Criss-crossed the fronds, blessed, behind a crucifix.Still two...

Children’s Books and the Christian Story

Sally Thomas

It is one thing to talk about the Resurrection. It is quite another to see the Easter fire struck in the night, the candle lit, the light of Christ...

Tomie dePaola’s Icons

Sally Thomas

Real artists don’t copy.” Tomie dePaola, the children’s author and illustrator who died last week at age eighty-five, once recalled this counsel given him as a child of four...

Epiphany

Sally Thomas

He tells himself a tale his grandmother told:Babuschka sleeps by the fire. Outside new snowLaps the window. Camels look in from the cold.Wise-crowned kings—they know her name—say, GoWith us,...

First Sunday

Sally Thomas

In Advent, the hermit lights a candle-end,Drips wax onto a saucer, stands it there.The early nightfall forms itself aroundThis little shivering flame. He says his prayer:Stir up Thy power,...

Not Duffers, Won’t Drown

Sally Thomas

These stories are all about unsupervised children,” my oldest daughter observed years ago, when we were reading Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books aloud, one after another, books in...

Foster Child

Sally Thomas

Everywhere she goes, he goes. She’s brought him here for Sunday tea. He’s been with me two weeks , she says and deftly shifts him on her knee. The...

Snow Weather

Sally Thomas

A falcon on a wire Against the laden sky Scanned his brown empire With a black-ice eye. Nothing beneath him stirred In that sunless instant But my heart, for...

Foster Child

Sally Thomas

Everywhere she goes, he goes. She’s brought him here for Sunday tea. He’s been with me two weeks , she says and deftly shifts him on her knee. The...

Shadows in Amsterdam

Sally Thomas

Years ago, I lived in an old brown house that had been converted into apartments. Next door lived a Dutchman, older than I was and divorced, with a son...

iPhones Have Consequences

Sally Thomas

In a Doonesbury cartoon of recent vintage, Zipper, nephew to the 1960s slacker Zonker Harris, sits in a college class, his laptop open before him, giving every impression of...

Smelly Olde England

Sally Thomas

I lived, while in England, at a confluence—the intersection of a pedestrian lane, which led to three pubs, and a busy road, which led to practically everywhere else. We...

Fantasy and Faith

Sally Thomas

The winter I was ten, my teacher read A Wrinkle in Time aloud to our class, a chapter a day. It was, in my view, the sole reason for...

Grooving on Jesus

Sally Thomas

The Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was less a coherent movement than a generalized wave of religious reformation—influenced, as the wider culture was influenced, by aspects of...

Schooling at Home

Sally Thomas

One morning, as the four children and I prepared to start the school day, I consulted the saints’ dictionary, as I habitually do, to see whose feast it might...