Busy Bee

Day 330: My maternal grandmother was a schoolteacher and a thoroughly Christian woman in the old sense of the word. She doted on didactic poems and other Victorian-era means of illustrating life lessons, and one which she quoted to me often was Isaac Watts' "Against Idleness and Mischief." If you don't recognize the title, it's no wonder, although you undoubtedly will have heard it in some form, opening with "How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour / And gather honey all the day from every opening flower." It concludes with "For Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do." She also employed a second take on the ending when she was trying to impart the patience required for needlework to me when I was only three: "Idle hands are the devil's playground." So firmly did she instill the lesson in my youthful psyche that today, I cannot sit down for longer than five minutes without some project in my hands. People wonder how I find time for needlework. I wonder how they can waste it in front of a television set.