Wow, the season can really slide by. Today? I am going to go swimming! Have to. Have to.

a beautiful surprise

It’s been a quiet week.  By that, I mean fairly unscheduled (there were nine yard crews and a morning of limb removal on our street).  The light and air were pretty the day I took two of the Star Maps outside.
I had time to weed, clean, visit my sister, get our rugs cleaned.  Boxed up the old tape players from the Perkins Library to return them.

end of an era

Both of my boys qualified for audio books and machines from the Braille and Talking Book Library.  What a great service that has been! Tapes delivered to your door, free postage to return, a large library to choose from.  With my older son, in particular, it made a huge difference.  Some months in middle school, he listened to six or seven books on tape, which meant that he entered high school more literate than some of his better-reading peers.
Me? I am slogging through the excellent novel, “Cloudsplitter” — by Russell Banks.  I don’t really recommend reading THREE 800 pages novels in a year (“Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens and “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, being the other two).  To get through this one (even though it’s SUPERB), I had to take breaks to read six shorter novels and Stephen King’s wonderful, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft“.

Earlier in the year, I read another historic novel about the radical abolitionist, John Brown:  “The Good Lord Bird” by James McBride. Have learned a lot about Kansas and Missouri and how the battle about slavery played out there in the years leading up to the Civil War.