The Hardages’ home in South Carolina backed up to a swamp which afforded them many hours of quiet enjoyment of nature. This photo by Jeanette Hardage captured at least two of the creatures that regularly visited that area, alligators and egrets. In the piece below, …
Read MoreSpring Rebirth
As spring bursts forth again, enjoy Jeanette Hardage’s poem below, originally entitled “April 10: For Doug,” which celebrates the growth, beauty, and hope of the season. She penned this sonnet in honor of her younger brother Doug, pictured here with a teenaged Jeanette along with …
Read MoreAn Hour and Twenty Bucks
In an undated journal entry, Jeanette Hardage shared the experience of visiting a “third hand” bookstore in Dartmouth, UK. It was located in a repurposed old stone church called St. Barnabas and it was characterized by the kind of haphazard organization that often seems to …
Read MoreIn Praise of Cats
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 …
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