Inklings // September 2025

We had an action packed but lovely month here. Then just in the last few days a nip has arrived in the air. And I'm so excited! It can vary here and it's so nice to feel like we'll actually have a chilly fall season. (Now just to lean into some further autumn comfiness... I'm thinking of pulling out throw blankets, some apple pie baking, and wrapping my hands round a warm mug of chai tea.) Do you have anything you're looking to forward to in this coming season? :)

As always, feel free to join any time here until the next prompt goes up! 💜 

Rules:

1. At any time during the month, on your own blog post a scene from a book or film that matches the prompt, including a link back here in your post.

2. Make sure to come back and leave a link to your entry in the box on this post. That's it!

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September's prompt is:

A forest scene in book or film

I decided it's high time to highlight one of my all time top favorites (and which I may or may not have speed read most of last Saturday for the umpteenth time), L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle. IMHO, one of her wittiest and most absolutely lyrical works. (The emotion and banter are on another level entirely.) Anyway, it had been a fair amount of time since my last read though and I was literally squealing that all the thrill and excitement are still absolutely there. (And yes, I'm a grown woman, but I don't know any other word to adequately express what happened other than to say that I squealed. You can ask my husband. Hem! Ok, moving on. xD)

The decision to highlight it this month was obvious, but it's so packed with delicious descriptions, picking out what to highlight (and also not share any actual spoilers) proved tricky. But (playing it very safe xD) here goes:

'They didn't spend all their days on the island. They spent more than half of them wandering at will through the enchanted Muskoka country. Barney knew the woods as a book and he taught their lore and craft to Valancy. He could always find trail and haunt of the shy wood people. Valancy learned the different fairy-likenesses of the mosses--the charm and exquisiteness of woodland blossoms. She learned to know every bird at sight and mimic its call--though never so perfectly as Barney. She made friends with every kind of tree. She learned to paddle a canoe as well as Barney himself. She liked to be out in the rain and she never caught cold.

Sometimes they took a lunch with them and went berrying--strawberries and blueberries. How pretty blueberries were--the dainty green of the unripe berries, the glossy pinks and scarlets of the half ripes, the misty blue of the fully matured! And Valancy learned the real flavour of the strawberry in its highest perfection. There was a certain sunlit dell on the banks of Mistawis along which white birches grew on one side and on the other still, changeless ranks of young spruces. There were long grasses at the roots of the birches, combed down by the winds and wet with morning dew late into the afternoons. Here they found berries that might have graced the banquets of Lucullus, great ambrosial sweetnesses hanging like rubies to long, rosy stalks... When Valancy carried any of these berries home that elusive essence escaped and they became nothing more than the common berries of the market-place--very kitchenly good indeed, but not as they would have been, eaten in their birch dell until her fingers were stained as pink as Aurora's eyelids.

Or they went after water-lilies. Barney knew where to find them in the creeks and bays of Mistawis. Then the Blue Castle was glorious with them, every receptacle that Valancy could contrive filled with the exquisite things. If not water lilies then cardinal flowers, fresh and vivid from the swamps of Mistawis, where they burned like ribbons of flame.

...Holmes speaks of grief "staining backward" through the pages of life; but Valancy found her happiness had stained backward likewise and flooded with rose-colour her whole previous drab existence. She found it hard to believe that she had ever been lonely and unhappy and afraid.

"When death comes, I shall have lived," thought Valancy.' 

I hope you enjoyed and I highly recommend adding to the top of your TBR pile and /or would love to hear if you've already read it! 💜 (Also, I realized it's a little tricky to figure out the context, but it's very much set in the everyday world of the 1920's.)  

You can pop your links below:

🌿 Have fun and can't wait to see what y'all come up with! 🌿