Journeys with a Real Jack in the Pulpit

📖 The Scoop

Journeys with a Real Jack-in-the-Pulpit begins in 1910, when a lively daughter, Helen Louise, was born to middle-aged parents in Rhode Island, and ends 95 years later on an historic homestead in southeastern Massachusetts. Over the course of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, Helen Philbrick has led many lives, outpacing her husband's cousin, Herbert Philbrick, whose own book proclaims that he led three. Whether as a child chafing under Victorian constraints or as occupational therapist, silversmith, clergy wife, weaver, Biodynamic gardening pioneer, conservationist, chair caner, student of Anthroposophy, advocate of simplicity, teacher, or writer, Helen's humor and keen eye for people and the world enliven this engaging memoir. The opening chapters offer a fascinating view of the New England of nearly a century ago, when almost everything from child rearing practices and the routines of daily life to technology and industry was very different from current norms. There were so many rules of etiquette. "Don't speak until you are spoken to," Helen wrote. "Keep your voice soft, and retreat if anyone ever challenges you. Children kept out of sight, even when they were deeply involved in all kinds of indescribable mischief, such as when I made Hallowe'en decorations in the cellar out of rat poison because someone told me it was fluorescent." The book follows Helen and her parents, Franklin and Ethel Porter, as they moved from Rhode Island to the North Shore of Massachusetts. Helen vividly describes the active, participatory ways in which people in small towns entertained themselves at a time when radio was in its infancy and television was decades away. She recounts her mother's friendship with Maria Grey Kimball and the creation of the Federation of Women's Clubs; the adoption of an eighteen-year-old boy as her brother when Helen was four; and growing up in the Holten House, a seventeenth century historic building in Danvers, owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, where the Porters were caretakers. Franklin's silversmithing career flourished there, and Helen learned the craft from him in a toolshed her father named "Saint Dunstan's." She describes in fascinating detail the craft of the silversmith and her father's steadily growing reputation as a twentieth-century Paul Revere. A tall, imposing figure in blue poplin smock and Windsor tie, Franklin Porter created silver that is now in private and museum collections, including those of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. He received interesting commissions and created a tea infuser for the Queen of Siam and a Memorial Eucharist Set for the Resurrection Chapel at the National Cathedral, Washington. Helen often worked with her father on these assignments. The heart of the book covers her partnership with the Rev. John H. Philbrick and the adventures they shared together the Journeys with a Real-Jack-in-the Pulpit of the book's title. After graduating from Wheaton College and the Boston School of Occupational Therapy, Helen married John in 1937, beginning a shared life of serving small Episcopal parishes; learning and teaching the arts of homesteading; and laughing often. In 1942, they bought Faith Homestead, an old house with five acres in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Soon they had hens, milk goats, sheep, ducks, geese, and pigs. They began to garden in earnest, attending conferences at the center for Biodynamic agriculture in Spring Valley, New York, to learn more. Eventually, they taught the principles of Biodynamics, which honors "the dynamic activity inherent in living plants" and the agricultural arts to hundreds of visitors to Duxbury. They learned that ". . . Biodynamic vegetables and fruits were carefully tended not with chemicals, but with homegrown natural materials that helped the earth itself to retain and develop its fertility. . . The purpose of Biodynamics is to h

Genre: Nature / General (fancy, right?)