Current Reading Pleasures--More Books

 Elizabeth Berg's The Year of Pleasures is one I regretted spending money on. I know, Berg is a wonderful author. I especially loved her The Pull of the Moon. 

The title and cover sold me the book and it started out so well. The dust jacket says that the book "is about acknowledging the solace found in ordinary things: a warm bath, good food, the beauty of nature, music, friends, and art." 

It's probably just me, at this stage of my life, but the book didn't live up to that statement and I put the book aside three pages before the ending and moved on to an old Isabel Dalhousie book, The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith. 

 While I've never been able to get into some other of McCall Smith's series, like The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the philosopher from Edinburgh, Isabel Dalhousie, is always balm to my spirits. And I particularly like her love of W. H. Auden.

I thought that love would last for ever, I was wrong that line of Auden's that contained a truth about everything, not just love. And we had to act as if things were not going to end, because if we did not, then we would do so little in life. People still planted oak trees and created gardens, which they might not do with quite the same enthusiasm, or would not do at all, if they stopped to think of the brevity of life.

In a nutshell, at this point in my life, the philosophy of that paragraph is part of what excites me about each day of my senior years, even during a pandemic. 

When I saw that McCall Smith had written a small book on Auden, What W. H. Auden Can Do For You, I had to get it. I took down my big book of Auden poetry, turning back and forth between the two as I read the little book. 

 

After reading again Auden's "Funeral Blues", that always saddens the reader, I read what McCall Smith wrote about it and "September 1, 1939" that was brought to wide attention after 9/11.

Auden in general speaks to the more mature mind, but the raw sorrow and sense of loss that the poem conveys spoke to a young audience that had probably never heard of him. 

He's speaking here of the young people, and not so young, who first heard the lines of "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and A Funeral. 

And the same might be said of "September 1, 1939," another poem that touched the public imagination so vividly. That poem was photocopied and faxed around New York in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade towers.

I was so moved by something McCall Smith wrote near the end of this book that I have to include it here as a reassurance to myself that while we are increasingly reminded that we are citizens of the world that we still can and surely should cherish and pass on to our children and their children the unique culture of our own region.  

Preserving the human scale of our lives in the face of the onslaught of globalization and its bland culture cannot be achieved by legislative fiat. The declared cultural policy of states may be to protect or enhance local culture--France does that, as does Canada, to an extent--but such measures sometimes seem to be no more than putting of a finger in a dike of a near-universal popular culture. It is very difficult to protect ourselves from fast-food chains or standardized coffee bars; it is equally difficult to keep fragile or threatened cultures alive in the face of blandishments of powerful offerings from far away. Many people today lead cultural lives that are rendered shallow because the things that have been authentic to their particular place are overshadowed by things made or done for them elsewhere, a long way from where they are, and having no ties to their past. That may be largely inevitable, given technological change, but it involves the loss of possibilities of feeling and belonging and fosters a consequent impoverishment of spirit. We can restore the power of the local by resisting the claims of those forces that would take away from us our control of our local lives. It is not particularly easy, but victories can be achieved against impersonal agencies, against empires even, by people asserting the value of what is local to them and taking back the power to control it.  

That's a long quote from Alexander McCall Smith's What Auden Can Do For You, but struck me as so important when I see those of us in the United States being herded into a homogenized people, with even regional dialects fading away. I hope we won't all be molded into one smiling programed American prototype much as a Data from Star Trek. 

Thank you to any who have read this long and probably boring book post. I bet you're glad I have comments turned off on my blog! These posts are probably self-indulgent but reducing my screen time on my phone by 50% this last week, mainly from not looking at Facebook has given me time to actually do something with all the books stuffed with post-it notes in my office. Back on my shelves they go when I finish another book post!

My next book post will be about some of what I call my Nursery Food books that I've turned to when that is all I could handle in my bedtime reading. 

 

 

 

March Reading and Old Diaries

I love combing through my six bookshelves for a good book to read and Elizabeth Goudge's The Scent of Water is one I reread with much pleasure recently. That one is worth a whole blog post, someday.

As many books as I have, a trip to Goodwill always ends with me finding a few books I haven't yet read, and Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, and Open House by Elizabeth Berg came home with me this month. 

I thought I would like the Harris book as much as I did the movie from her Chocolat. I didn't--it was dark and depressing and Johnny Depp wasn't in it--but finished it as it was well written.

Berg's book was good, what Berg book isn't? Open House was an old one I'd missed, a fun read of a woman who discovers that her husband leaving her is not such a bad thing after all.

There came a day this winter when I had to break down and order some new paperbacks, rare for me when I can get them at Goodwill for 99 cents. But I was in the mood for something I hadn't read before and it needed to be something lite and fun and something to do with food.

Amy E. Reichert's The Coincidence of Coconut Cake and The Simplicity of Cider filled the bill. I'll be watching for more of her books. I loved the cider book, partly because of its setting in Door County, Wisconsin where blogger Angela of The Parisienne Farmgirl has recently moved. This was a good love story too, but all the details of the heroine in her craft cider business was fascinating. I always like stories where the work people do is woven into the plot and this was accomplished beautifully in The Simplicity of Cider.

If you like chef centered novels, The Coincidence of Coconut Cake is a good one for you. I'll skip trying the recipe for coconut cake in this book because my mama's recipe for it with lemon filling is the Bomb. But I do want to duplicate one meal in the book, where friends are gathered outside for a grill meal:

An hour later, the four of us sat at the patio table laden with the sliced pork, mojo sauce, black beans, cilantro lime rice, and grilled peppers and onions.

Hello! That meal is calling my name. But will Lou find out that the restaurant critic who was responsible for her business going south is the same man she has fallen in love with? Will she forgive him?

I saw that ending coming, naturally, which is not a bad thing, not to me. I no longer have to be shocked in a book or in life, and I much prefer a happy ending after some twists and turns.

What I most liked about Amy E. Reichert's books is that they are set in Wisconsin. I am now in love with Wisconsin! 

I turned to a different kind of reading material the other day--my old journals. I pulled out a dusty one from 1992 and began in March. Humor me, will you, while I go back 26 years?

In March of 1992, my sister had just found out after what seemed like a very long wait that she did not have breast cancer, news that made her family very very happy. 

This made me think of a dear friend who has recently gone through the same wait to be given the same good news. And today a dear family member was given an all-clear on a CT scan.

I am clapping my hands here!!

March gives out good news and it gives out bad news, as all months do.

On March 17, 1992, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed, and there was also an attack on a group of high school students in Israel where two students died by sword and others were injured.

I recently posted about Anti-Semitism. Will there ever come a time, short of Heaven, where we don't wake up to hear more horrifying news on television? From places you expect and in places you used to not expect it to happen?

Aren't people ever taught to play nicely as children anymore?

In March of 1992, Zack counted over 200 daffodils in bloom in our yard. Okay, I admit it, I sure do miss all my spring bulbs at Valley View. This past autumn neither RH or I were emotionally up to planting bulbs at our new house. We hope to this year.

In March of 1992, my sweet corgi Tex and I spooked five deer in our woods, and we had just watched, for the first time, The Long, Long Trailer with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz during our Friday family pizza and a movie night. And laughed our heads off. Almost as much as we did when we first watched Home Alone. 

Those were lovely years, when Friday nights meant pizza and a movie and kids at home with us, before they were old enough to play on the basketball team on Friday nights, before Friday night became Date Night.

I think I've moved on but sometimes I wonder. I miss them and I miss the sweet corgi who was there with us.

In March of 1992, we went to our friends' house one night for a steak dinner and Scattergories. Our friends are no longer here on this earth.

In March of 1992, we awakened two mornings with snow and ice on the daffodils--mother nature replayed that scene here this March of 2018, twice. It was a beautiful sight here last week when I opened the kitchen door to find light snow had fallen on flowering trees around the pond.

In March of 1992, I had just called all males with strong backs inside to completely switch the furniture in two rooms, our dining room and living room. Years later we switched them back again. Hey, I've been rearranging rooms since I was 14 years old. And six decades later I'm still doing it, and still calling on all strong backs in the family for help.

Two weekends ago when we had family here for supper, between supper and dessert RH called two sons and a grandson to my bedroom to move my bed. I could not believe how they did it--four men went to each corner and LIFTED my king-size bed in the air, over the top of other furniture and placed it on the opposite wall.

They earned their pecan pie for dessert!

I've warned RH that when I stop rearranging rooms is the day he needs to order my tombstone. It's not going to happen until then. However, I think I'm beginning to have found my sweet spot in this house and there won't be as much furniture rearranging from now on. But I can't promise anything.

I do know that there are big goings on in the backyard that I'm so excited about. It's moving along slowly after the first five days of intensive work by RH. Then came bad weather interruptions and now the Cold Bug of Guinness World Records to hit him. Hoping he's better when our son comes here after Easter to help him continue his latest project.

Here's a tiny preview of Phase I, Bree-Bree checking out what dad's done so far:

Another project is planned sometime, I hope. Seven boxes of flooring have been sitting under my dining table for almost three months now, awaiting installation in my kitchen. You may not can tell from this picture because who notices a floor when our daughter-in-law and granddaughter are so dang pretty, but our kitchen flooring must have come from leftover tiles used in a school hallway, and their condition gets a failing grade.

But that will surely happen someday, I hope. It took 14 years, from 1990 to 2004 at Valley View, for RH to add on a brand new kitchen.

Fourteen years from now, 2018 to 2032, might find me beyond caring--or knowing--whether I have a new floor in my kitchen. Let's hope it happens before I turn the boxes under my dining table into Lincoln Logs for visiting children.

With an hour to spare the other day before my annual opthamologist appointment, RH and I stopped by another Goodwill and I found three books that had my name on them, figuratively. Truly, when these things happen I know it was meant to be.

Here's the one I'm reading now, only 30 pages in so far, but I am enjoying it so much.

David Grayson said this about March: "The key virtue is endurance." I know that people in the Northeast section of the US have been called upon for that virtue during March of 2018. I hope that some good books have made it easier.

Happy reading and happy journaling,
Dewena

Blogging for Ballast

Claudia...glanced at her watch with satisfaction. It was only ten o'clock, the beds were made and lunch was ready, except for frying the bacon. It seemed that the more one used of a day, the more of a day there was to use.

(Young Claudia by Rose Franken)

Think of that! To have the housework done by ten o'clock--in the morning, that is.

Not going to happen if you sit down at your computer in the morning, not for me, it's not. If I sit down to check my blog, i.e., comments left for me and then email to answer those comments and then visiting those blogs first to leave comments on their blogs and then just a peek at other blogs with new posts so I can leave comments on theirs...would you look at the clock! Two hours have passed. How did that happen? And the energy I had for housework when I got out of bed, where did that go? Well, the title wasn't Young Claudia for nothing. Rose Franken didn't name her book Old Claudia, did she? 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness....

(Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities)

Pardon me, I thought we were discussing blogging here...Oh, that's right we were discussing blogging.

When I began to blog it was to be for three reasons. First was to express the love I have for houses. Houses and stories of the people who live in them. Not a house blog like so many charming ones that feature pictures of beautiful houses, although I dearly love to look at them. Not even a house blog showing the blogger's own house, although I have probably tried to do that much too much. R.H. and I are older householders and while I don't think we're stuck in a time warp, which can be a trap for older people, there really doesn't seem to be a classification for our "style." It has derived mainly from having to use what we already owned into the colorful, cozy, cluttered look that we like, along with some gee-whiz-let's-try-this-look-for-a-change decor choices.

No, my first desire to blog was to share (surely there's got to be a better word than the overdone share, but I can't think of it right now) the rooms and houses I've fallen in love with in books, the alternate world I live in. 

The second reason I began to blog was to record the beauty of this secluded valley where we are blessed to live and the simple things of our life here at Valley View. This was to be a joint project with R.H. who, new camera in hand, would make these pictures possible. The blog also wandered away of its own volition to include family history that kept popping up in our minds or that I came across in my old journals.

Then there is that third reason for blogging. I wanted my children, someday, to know who it was they were going to be burying. You didn't read that wrong. Part of the reason I wanted to start blogging was so that my children would someday know who they were burying, because I often felt that they did not have a clue. 

Have you every felt that way?

Here is one of Elizabeth Berg's characters speaking in The Pull of the Moon:

He said, I remember when my mother went through her change. For a while, I think for a whole year, she acted crazy as hell. She was all depressed and weepy--used to lock herself in the bathroom and wouldn't come out. I don't know what she was doing in there, but it was bad, we had only one bathroom and six kids. But then, all of a sudden, she was done with that. She launched herself into a new life where she felt she could say the hell with anything she didn't like, and by God, she did say the hell with anything she didn't like. She quit making dinner unless she wanted to, and she wanted to only about once a week. She wore these turquoise pedal pushers almost every day, big hoop earrings. She was really different, and at first this scared me, but then I realized I liked her better. She became a real person to me. She was interesting. After my father died, she moved into a small house that was entirely her. And she was happy, I swear until the day she died. We knew exactly who we were burying.

Think of that! Wouldn't you sometimes, once in a blue moon, want to be like her? I would, but there's just one problem. Believe it or not, I'm a tad too nice to be saying "the hell with that" too often. Turquoise pedal pushers and big hoop earrings? Probably not but maybe a variation of Jenny Joseph's "When I am old I will wear purple" lines. That sounds doable. And one of my when-I-am-old moments these last two weeks of NOT blogging has been to reassess what I want blogging to be like for me in the future. I cannot make blogging a business, never intended to. I discovered blogs about a year and a half before I began to blog and during that time I visited them for enjoyment, inspiration, often for motivation, and also purely for the good company. I lost some of that lately. Instead I found myself trying to visit as many blogs as possible and leave comments. It took hours of my day, a necessity I was told, if you want to build your blog. Time required for that, ladies and gentlemen. Lots of valuable time.

So, no more attempting to build my blog. I will go back to what it was meant to be, I hope, and limit my time doing it to allow me the time I need to keep my house in reasonable shape, spend the time needed in the office of our family business, and still give me time to enjoy family and my passion for reading and the scribbling I've done for years about families from the 1840s to the 1950s, these secret families whose characters have become as real to me over the years as family.

I hope to post once or sometimes twice a week--much shorter posts than this one, I promise--and spend two or three nights a week visiting my blog friends purely because I love visiting them and seeing what they're up to in their house, their garden, their family, their beloved pets. I will try to leave thoughtful comments to encourage them and exchange emails with those who have become friends.

I realize that blogging may be something entirely different for others, and I do offer this word of encouragement for women from the pen of Catherine Drinker Bowen from an article she wrote in 1937 in Woman's Home Companion--and this lady knew whereof she was speaking:

I urge women, young women, to find out now what they can do and enjoy best, and do it all during those busy years of motherhood, if only for ten minutes a day. Or if they cannot do it for ten minutes, then let them think about doing it...We need it as ballast for our emotions, as wings for that individuality which we abandoned during our busy happy sacrificial years. Begin at twenty or earlier, if you are lucky enough to have found your bent and your talent then. Nor need it be talent. Taste, inclination, curiosity, interest--any of these is enough.

Catherine sounds like a smart cookie to me. If blogging gives you this ballast or is a means of sharing (Help! another word, please!) the loves and talents you have, then what an amazing thing blogs are and no doubt a huge reason for their popularity today. How much of your life that blogging consumes is something that has to be examined personally and periodically. I have read several posts lately where some smart cookies are doing just that. Good for them!

Blogging can be "the best of times and the worst of times" and it can also be valuable ballast.