5 Quick Things #337 🍂

fall gardening, the Enlightenment, butter lattes, & parenting older kids

Hey there,

This week I bought a small collection of pumpkins for our front porch, met with friends outside at the neighborhood coffee shop, and almost needed a light cardigan to go over my tank top during yesterday morning’s walk. I burned down the last of the summer-scented candles, I’ve been tossing a pinch of pumpkin pie spice into my butter lattes at home, and as I mentioned last week, I’m coercing Kyle into fetching my box of fall decor from the attic this weekend. …All these signs point to autumn on its way.

Everyone loves autumn, and I’m always contemplating why. Each season has its positives, but there’s something in particular about this season of transition between long summer days and winter holidays, pumpkin-spice-everything, and pretending-to-like-football (or is that just me?) that calls out something higher in our souls. I wonder whether it scratches an itch, even temporarily, of some deeper longing for feeling at home, feeling comfortable in one’s skin (not too hot, not too cold), and for living more present in the moment.

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5 Quick Things ☕️

1. New episode of A Drink With a Friend! 👈 One of my dearest pals, Sarah Mackenzie, and I talk about all sorts of stuff on our minds: the art and business of writing, parenting older kids, reaping the long-awaited fruits of homeschooling, and more. We talk all the time (and manage to see each other several times a year), but this time we’ve recorded it so you can join in.

2. Right now I’m staring at my long-dead summer backyard garden, currently full of weeds, not really sure what to do with it if I’m honest. Every year I want to plant a fall garden, seeing as fall through spring is actually the best time to garden here in central Texas, but every year it sneaks up on me and whooshes by in the busyness of starting a new school year. I’m also wanting to incorporate more flowers in my gardening, having long stuck with vegetables, for a few reasons: I love them, first and foremost, but secondly because I’m currently eating carnivore so it feels rather contradictory to plan for a harvest of veggies when I may not eat them (though I’m not a purist, nor am I the only one who lives here). Our backyard is full sun, so if anyone has any tips for growing autumn flowers in zone 8B, I’m all ears.

3. This week in my humanities class I finished teaching A Tale of Two Cities, dovetailing it with the French Revolution (obviously). As a three-year-cycle class, this year’s is “modern,” studying roughly 1850 to the present day. Yet I wanted to start it with the French Revolution, a bit over fifty years prior to our time period, for one main reason: unpacking the Enlightenment theory gone wrong. Rousseau’s social contract theory, thanks to this wild and crazy European era, ultimately rattled the foundations of Western civilization from its disastrous application in the Revolution, Reign of Terror, and beyond, and its tremors are still felt today. I told my students that yes, I’m harping on and on about the affects of the Enlightenment worldview because it will keep coming up as we move into the twentieth century to today. As creatures of the Enlightenment worldview, I don’t think we understand just how cataclysmic its basic tenets flipped the script on what it means to be a human who lives in a society with others, and how we’re all so immersed in it we can’t imagine thinking otherwise. As one small example, which I first learned in Joshua Gibbs’ excellent Love What Lasts: before the Enlightenment people thought of themselves walking backwards into the future, looking at the past as they navigated into the unknown future. Now, we instinctively think of ourselves as walking through time forwards toward the future, leaving behind the known past. Most people didn’t think that way pre-Enlightenment, apparently. 🤯

4. Our neighborhood’s roads are currently all being repaved, and while they look nice …I didn’t really think they needed repaving to begin with. In fact, I could think of 2,749 other things I’d rather our city fix or address besides our otherwise formerly just-fine roads — and yet here we are. Do y’all’s cities do this too? I sometimes wonder if this is just an attempted bandaid solution wherein they hope it quiets the protests of other vocalized issues, simply because they have the asphalt, tar, and know-how for repaving perfectly good roads. (And yes, in saying this I feel like this.)

5. And finally… I’m bringing this up in a later-this-fall podcast episode (that I actually recorded yesterday), but I’ll go ahead and share now… Here’s my current go-to butter latte recipe that’s just delightfully good (and also happens to be both keto and carnivore-ish friendly): pour roughly 16 ounces of hot coffee in the blender, add a tablespoon of butter, sprinkle in a dash of spices (cinnamon, pumpkin pie blend, etc.) and blend for 5-7 seconds. If you’re me, these days you also add a splash of trace minerals and half an LMNT chocolate packet (make sure the butter is unsalted in that case). Positively DELICIOUS.

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Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (excellent read by the actor Dan Stevens!)

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Quotable 💬

“To educate means to help the human soul enter into the totality of the real.”

― Luigi Giussani

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Rhine River 2025 ⚓️

Want to join me and my family (and your new kindred-spirit friends) floating down the Rhine River from Amsterdam to Zurich? We’ll explore certain places like St. Hildegard von Bingen’s abbey, Cologne Cathedral, the storybook village of Strasbourg, Germany’s Black Forest region, the Swiss Alps, and more.

painting of St. Hildegard von Bingen’s abbey; artist unknown #

I’d love you to join — you truly won’t regret it! These pilgrimages, without question, are the highlight of my year. It’ll be the same for you.

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Would you rather be too hot or too cold? 🥵🥶

Being too cold is definitely my answer right now as well, but I almost guarantee you the answers would be flipped if I asked this in, say, February. I just may do that.

• Too hot: 41.8%

• Too cold: 58.2%

Find next week’s poll here.

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Quick Links 🔗

• 📐Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

• 🛶 Join me along the Rhine River

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Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What’s been on your to-do list for awhile that you could check off with just a bit of concentrated focus today?

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Have a great weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. - Accidental Baroque photographs.