Jan Karon - In This Mountain

www.mitfordbooks.com

Join the Mitford Community online to share news, recipes,

birthday greetings, and more, and to receive the Mitford

newsletters, notes from Jan, and special offers. To get a printed

copy of the newsletter sent to your home, please send a post

card with your name and address to:

Penguin Marketing Dept. cc

Mitford Requests-R

375 Hudson St.

New York, NY 10014

Or email the information to reading@us.penguingroup.com

Warm thanks to:

Bishop Andrew Fairfield; The Reverend Frank Clark; The Reverend John Yates; The Anglican Digest , a great resource and a consistently good read; Langford at Farmers Hardware; Murray Whisnant; Dr. Peter Haibach; Barbara Conrad Pinnix; Kenny Isaacs; Betty Newman; Jeff Harris; Bishop Keith Ackerman; The Reverend Edward Pippin; Rick Carter, Esq.; Ted Carter; Don Mertz; Dr. Chuck Colson; Kent Watson; Ron Humphrey; Wayne Erbsen; Graham Childrens Health Center, Asheville, NC; Janet Miller; Ivy Nursery; The Reverend Gale Cooper; Cheryl Lewis; The Reverend Christopher Henderson; Dr. Karen DiGeorgis; Dr. Chris Grover; Alice Boggs Lentz; Richard A. Propst; Dharma Benincasa; The Reverend Harry N. Hill; The Reverend Jeffrey Palmer Fishwick; Joni Roseman; Nancy Briggs; Dr. David Ludwig; Janet Cherchuck; Stephen Shifflett; Jeffrey Garrison; Sharon Vandyke; R. David Craig; and Jerry Burns, man about town.

Special thanks to:

Dr. Paul Thomas Klas; The Reverend James Harris; Dr. Sue Frye; Nancy Lou Beard, Joke Queen; Michael Thacker, my right hand; and to my valued readers and booksellers for your boundless enthusiasm and encouragement.

In memoriam:

Sonya Massi, sister in Christ, 19342001; those lost in the Pentagon and World Trade Center catastrophes, and the Pennsylvania plane crash of September 11.

Go and Tell

Mixed Blessings

The Future Hour

www.seek&find.com

A Sudden Darkness

The Vale

Grace Sufficient

Tender Mercies

Touching God

Up and Doing

To Sing in the Dark

Where the Heart Is

Sammy

Waiting for Wings

In This Mountain

Gizzards Today

A Coal Yet Burning

Looking Alike

A Day in Thy Courts

In Everything

Salmon Roulade

Even to the Dust

A Place of Springs

Moles again!

Father Tim Kavanagh stood on the front steps of the yellow house and looked with dismay at the mounds of raw earth disgorged upon his frozen March grass.

Holes pocked the lawn, causing it to resemble a lunar surface; berms of dirt crisscrossed the yard like stone walls viewed from an Irish hilltop.

He glanced across the driveway to the rectory, once his home and now his rental property, where the pesky Talpidae were entertaining themselves in precisely the same fashion. Indeed, they had nearly uprooted Hlne Pringles modest sign, Lessons for the Piano, Inquire Within ; it slanted drunkenly to the right.

Year after year, hed tried his hand at mole-removal remedies, but the varmints had one-upped him repeatedly; in truth, they appeared to relish coming back for more, and in greater numbers.

He walked into the yard and gave the nearest mound a swift kick. Blast moles to the other side of the moon, and leave it to him to have a wife who wanted them caught in traps and carted to the country where they might frolic in a meadow among buttercups and bluebells.

And who was to do the catching and carting? Yours truly.

He went inside to his study and called the Hard to Beat Hardware in Wesley, believing since childhood that hardware stores somehow had the answers to lifes more vexing problems.

Voles! exclaimed the hardware man. What most peopleve got is voles, they just think theyre moles!

Aha.

What voles do is eat th roots of your plants, chow down on your bulbs an all. Have your bulbs bloomed th last few years?

Why, yes. Yes, they have.

The hardware man sighed. So maybe it is moles. Well, theyre in there for the grubs, you know, what you have to do is kill th grubs.