Anita’s Bio

This went up on Ransom Fellowship’s website today and I thought there might be a few folks out there who’d be interested. For the past two years, Anita has been a good part of our life as a housemate and friend. Now it’s official: She is Ransom’s Resident Assistant. A newly minted position:

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 of Directors, have come 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 concentrate 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 to the 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. Bleh.

 Holding Honeysuckle.

 Visiting The Yarn Garage

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 not quite full-time. And in exchange for rent from us she is responsible for the yard and does mostly whatever pleases her in the garden. Altogether it is full-time work. Thanks be to God for riches so graciously shared with us.