Zing,
zing, zing. Seems like this year, there goes my summer. That’s probably true
every summer, but this one, times three. So, here goes on what I trust (cross
my fingers) is the last update on the ongoing melodrama of Trilla’s personal
life—in the next few months, it’ll be more about Trilla’s book life.
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| Foster is happy to be home with his own food bowl. "Feed me!" |
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| Ginger doesn't mind being an only cat again. Not on bit. |
The doctor told Kate to stay with us
two months. That lasted about two-and-a-half weeks. She’s back at work, but still can’t put
weight on left leg at all, and so
this means we’re still helping out lots, but we’re all easier on our own turfs.
Happiest of all with the arrangement? No surprise—Foster Cat.
So my “reading just for fun days” have
slowed and I’m turning to other books, but still reading lots and lots and lots
and lots. And I’m not totally serious yet. I had a great fling, and a good
transition with Susan Wittag Albert’s Widow’s
Tears. (http://www.amazon.com/Widows-Tears-Bayles-Wittig-Albert/dp/0425255727/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373379759&sr=1-1&keywords=widow%27s+tears+susan+wittig+albert). A great story, particularly if you, like I
am, a longtime friend of China and Ruby. But it’s more than just a story. Albert packs
lots in there. Not really escapism, and
it’s set in the beautiful countryside around Round Top, Texas—a place I
love. Indeed, I recommend it.
Then being a reviewer for Story
Circle Book brought me just what I needed! Home
Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America
appeared at the front door as if on cue. I’ve been journaller about as long as
I can remember. A one-year diary showed up under the Christmas tree every year
with the same dependability as the doll at top of the red stocking, and
continued even after the dolls went away. I made my most recent entry this morning.
Part of my life. I was ready, ready for this book.
Joan Wehlen Morrison was a greater
journaller than I. What’s more, while I assume “no one’s ever going to care
about these” and store them helter-skelter and here-and-there, Joan wrote
thinking that her journals would be
read, stored them carefully, and made sure her writer daughter knew where they
were. That daughter, Susan Morrison has
turned these journals into a story of both her mother’s life from when she
turned 14 in December of 1936 to 1943 when she met her future husband of 66
years. But Morrison has done more. She’s captured a slice, a small slice but an
important one, of American history. This is an important book.
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| Well read now, and I'll be reading it again. |
And inspirational to me. My next
get-organized is not going to be the mess under the kitchen counter that’s on
the schedule now. No. I’m going to take those boxes of disorganized mixed-up
journals and diaries and get them in chronological order, and then, I’m going
to read them. It may be that some do
indeed need discarding—I’ll do it now, and I’ll be the one to do it. But others
I’ll keep and who know, while likely they will never be published, someday
great or great-great grandchild may enjoy knowing what twentieth-century life
was like in the Panhandle of Texas.
Thank you Morrisons.
More to the moment, I’m thinking
about my weekend reading. Young Joan reported hearing and puzzling over the
stance of Charles Lindburg in the time leading up to the war. I knew Kate read and enjoyed the fictional account of Anne
Morrow Lindburg’s life, Aviator’s Wife. I
knew it was lying on her bedside table. Yesterday
when I visited Foster, I nabbed the book. Now it’s on my bedside table with the
first two chapters consumed—and it is not the weekend yet.
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| Waiting for bedtime and Chapter 3, maybe 4. |
(This
entry is also posted at http://storycirclenetwork.wordpress.com)
