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Anita Gorder
Resident Assistant
Anita Gorder has been living in Mole’s End, the small flat at the back of Toad Hall for a while now. Long enough for all of us to get to know each other well. It’s been only gradually that Denis and I, and now our Board, came to see how uniquely qualified Anita was for becoming our assistant. (We always knew we liked her, nay, loved her.) Having her at this stage of our ministry and life is truly providential and something only God could have planned. Her being here allows us to concentrat more fully on such things as writing.
Anita is a native of Seattle, WA, but spent a few years getting her college education in Alaska, and working summers at an island salmon factory where bear alerts were common and the smell of fish stuck in her hair twenty-four-seven was not enough to diminish her love of eating her favorite wild salmon: The King.
Along the way she visited Swiss L’Abri, eventually ending up at Rochester L’Abri as a helper. With her interest in gardening and landscape, we hired her to re-do our flower beds. That was the beginning. We learned she had a special interest and talent for creating beauty in many mediums from iron-works to jewelry making. But her favorite, by far, is fiber art – creating things that range from practical to whimsical. From sheep shearing to spinning and yarn dying, we’ve not only learned, we’ve been entertained by silk worms spinning, alpaca fleeces, and especially by her angora rabbit, Honeysuckle, who lives on our back porch and grows the finest white wool I’ve ever collected on my black coat. It loves to gather in my armpits, for some weird reason. Of my coat, you fool. She’s always doing something fascinating, this week it was baking silk worm cocoons to kill the pupa before she harvested the fibers.
Anita’s quiet, warm hospitality, her humor, hard work, her ability to cook the crap out of any recipe, work on our web site, do research, help outdoors, and put up with us, is so perfect I could cry. So what do we or Ransom do for her? Well, Ransom has given her a salaried position that is now full-time. And we've unleashed her inner gardening monster to do whatever it pleases to the yard and flower beds. Altogether she could put Margie entirely out of business except that she claims she cannot write and I still can. For the time being.
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Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
- Victor Hugo
We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
- P.D. James
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There are tulips on my desk, and I saw my first robin yesterday, clear signals that winter is losing its grip on the landscape. The newspaper reported an ice jam on a nearby river that forced the closure of several roads. Chunks of ice the size of dinner tables slammed through a county park. Even something as glorious of the arrival of spring is never as perfectly smooth as we would hope in this broken world. We are, as my spiritual mentor used to say, glorious ruins.
Finding what it means to flourish as broken human being in an imperfect world is what Ransom is about. We believe in Jesus Christ, though often find ourselves dismayed at what passes for Christianity in our postmodern world. We hope what you find on this site will be helpful in your own pilgrimage, regardless of where you happen to find yourself at the moment.
Denis & Margie Haack
Anita Gorder
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