The project, as we originally envisioned it, was going to be
a “let’s make this simple” collaboration:
you bring salad, you bring lasagna, I’ll bring dessert. Everybody contribute
what they can, and we keep writing until we have enough pages. But for some reason, the book kept stalling.
We all had other things to do, sometimes very big things, and it seemed we
would always have time enough to get back to it. Then, about a year ago, a new
version of the book started to take shape. Instead of just a few long chapters,
we began to pull some of our other writing together: talks, blog posts, even
emails. It tells our story in a different way than we had planned, but that’s
so often the way things have gone. It’s also a reflection of the way the
Advisory have worked together: occasionally in person, quite often by video
chat, but most often and always through daily writing.
The minutes of an Advisory meeting from about two years ago
(yes, we are That Organized) record that
“We talked about the need for all of us to encourage those whose chapters are
unwritten…” At the time, that referred only to ourselves, but as I look at that
now, I think it is more about the fellow travelers, those whose chapters are
partly written or who have just begun. As Wendi Capehart once wrote, “We pray
that our efforts continue to be a legacy for others seeking to strengthen their
own precious family bonds by educating their children using this beautiful
philosophy of education popularized by Miss Charlotte Mason.”