May 30, 2023
Gleanings
- if you spend a lot of time imagining a person’s reaction to a present it’s probably a sign that the present is mostly about you, anyhow.
- And again and again I keep revelling in the reaction of people as I say, “I appreciate you.”
- If you’ve ever wondered what booksellers have in their beach bags, wonder no more!
- and though overall I am still disappointed in it as a revision of Dickens’s novel, as its own novel Demon Copperhead is, I think, actually pretty good.
- I want the names of everything. The bees in the first tomato flowers — Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced; the Swainson’s thrush I heard as I went out for my swim–whit, whit; the long roots of Rumex acetosella, sheep’s sorrel, I keep pulling from between the pavers in the greenhouse. The rough-skinned newt, the Pacific tree frog (sometimes the chorus frog, once Hyla regilla, now Pseudacris regilla, though nothing about the frog has changed), Rosa ‘Félicité Perpétue’ by the front door, where the tree frogs lie low in the damp earth.
- As my children and I stood at the intersection of Dupont and Davenport, it literally felt like it was raining petals. I resisted the urge to pull out my phone and video the whole wild scene. Some things are better experienced with the eyes.
- But the thing I ran into when my kids left me, once again, with a basket of overpriced strawberries on their last legs — fruit they’d asked me to buy but then mysteriously lost interest in eating when it was presented to them at breakfast — and I decided to instead turn strawberries into strawberry-ade, so to speak, was that every lemonade recipe I’ve already published contains steps I lacked inclination to do.
- But I am most intrigued by Radha’s question in the book, describe the scent of your mother.
- This, my friends, is a book that will pull back a curtain and show you something incomparably lovely, and then while you are gazing at it in awe, punch you in the stomach.
- Critique works when we’re playing together, when we like and admire each other’s unique gifts, when there is an equal exchange of energies.
- Although helmets have ruined that feeling in my hair, I felt the cool breeze on my face as I tooled around the quiet streets of Weston. There’s not much left of that farmgirl flying fearlessly over gravel. I’m a bit wobbly and weeks from feeling confident on roads with actual traffic but it felt terrific!
- It is a testimony to Donna Tartt’s brilliance as as a writer that when I was in the book I rarely thought “There is no reason for sane people to behave like this,” but later I would be mulling it over, or trying to describe it why I liked the book so much to Mark, and couldn’t string it together.
- The world is full of questions, but art doesn’t hand you the answers. It makes an offering.
- As ever, the only real secret to creativity, is to work, to be creative, to be obsessed, to look at art, to read. You never hear of any successful artist talk about their secret being to go to cocktail parties, or art shows or poetry readings. (Though those can all be lovely things).
- That’s the thing about wonders. They’re fleeting, ever changing. Nothing stays the same, especially me. But when I look, I can find one or two, or seven delights. Today’s wonders bring me joy or peace.
