The Hardages were cat people. They spent many an hour stroking, feeding, grooming, and talking to cats, not to mention cleaning up their messes, looking for lost ones, and taking injured ones to the vet. Jeanette Hardage loved T.S. Elliot’s The Naming of Cats, and …
Read MoreSoli Deo Gloria
In an undated journal entry, Jeanette Hardage expressed the hope that her Christian identity would show through in all of her writing somehow, even when a book or article was not obviously sacred in nature. In the early 2000s, she began to foster this by …
Read MoreThe Eyes of a Child
In the early 1960s, a serious play accident meant that Jeanette Hardage’s eldest daughter was in danger of losing her right eye. After significant medical attention and time to heal, in December of 1961 the family Christmas letter reported that, despite pessimistic prognoses from the …
Read MoreA Child’s View of Death
On January 24, 1935, Jeanette Hardage’s younger brother Patrick died when he was not quite 7 weeks old. She included a poem about this experience in her Faith and Other Matters collection under the title of “Susie’s Question.” Since she was only just approaching her …
Read MoreOne of God’s Nobodies
Back in 2003, Jeanette Hardage started a train of thought that she never finished. She began an essay with, “I have long thought that somebody should write about God’s nobodies.” Contrasting them with Biblical “Somebodies” such as Moses, David, and Paul, she observed that Paul …
Read MoreChristmas Blessings
Here is an ecard that marries a couple of Jeanette Hardage’s passions: greeting card verses and stained glass. In addition to pursuing stained glass art projects as a hobby, Jeanette visited many European cathedrals to view their stained glass windows, and she reviewed at least …
Read MoreChristmas Gifts
In letters to friends, Jeanette Hardage thanked people for myriad gifts, but the ones that she seemed to cherish the most were gifts of hospitality, of ministry, and of self. Her poem below draws attention to the subject of gifts, and to the source of …
Read MoreThanksgiving Blessings
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jeanette Hardage worked hard on various greeting card verses. Here is one of her verses brought to life in a way she could not have imagined when she wrote it, and set to music composed by her granddaughter, …
Read MoreAutumn Leaves
In a Thanksgiving 2000 letter to family and friends, Jeanette Hardage first shared the poem below evoking the glory of autumn. She followed it with lines from a hymn by Matthias Claudius, “We Plow the Fields and Scatter,” which celebrates the changing seasons as good …
Read MoreEncounter with an Angel
Jeanette Hardage could sometimes be shy about sharing intimate details about herself. For instance, a couple of her most poignant poems disguise her involvement by describing an experience in the third person, using made-up people. Around 1998, she had an experience that she wanted to …
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