October Book List

Ten books read in October.

The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes I think I put Barnes on my list after reading a review about his book The Only Story. That one wasn't available at the library, but his Man Booker Prize winner was. It took me a couple tries to get into the story - one that makes you contemplate one's own life.

A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver  I have come to appreciate Oliver's poetry. This is the only volume our library presently has.

Plum Tree Crazy is the 19th in Laura Childs' Tea Shop Mystery series.

Finding Colin Firth by Mia March is a fun and heart-warming little story about three fans all hoping to meet Colin Firth when he comes to a small seaside town in Maine to film some scenes for a movie. (Hint: It is more about the three womens' lives than his.)

The Jury Master by Robert Dugoni Another new to me author and I don't remember where I saw his name. The story was okay once I got past the author's need to use as many metaphors as possible - 99% of which were bad and unnecessary. I almost gave up reading the book because of them.

Golden Prey and Twisted Prey by John Sandford are #'s 27 and 28 in his Lucas Davenport series. I am now caught up until his next one is published. By the way, Sandford knows how and when to use metaphors.

The last three of the ten read this month are ones I bought at the book sale so I didn't have to worry about getting books back to the library during my knee surgery and recuperation.

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey I got because I really want to read his book Oscar and Lucinda. Failing to find a copy of it, I decided to try the only book of his that I found. It took some getting into - a strange tale.

Sweet Thunder was one of Ivan Doig's final books. Doig has long been a favorite author of mine and while I enjoyed his earlier books more than the later ones, they have all provided some fine reading. Sweet Thunder is set in Butte, Montana in 1920 during the time when the great Anaconda Copper Mining Company ruled the town, the miners and most of the state.

A Shooting Star is one of Wallace Stegner's older novels, but one I hadn't read before. Stegner is another long time favorite author. I could not identify with the main character, a woman who has had everything her whole life, but is dissatisfied because her life has no purpose, no meaning. I kept thinking, "With all your money, influence, looks, etc. etc., you can surely find some way of helping those less fortunate." But her whole thing seemed to be about ruining the life she had and crying, 'poor me'.
Still, Stegner's fine writing and beautiful prose kept me reading even if I did think his protaganist was a self-obsessed neurotic.

An example of one of his passages: "He stood looking, and some tick of time went past - a moment or a thousand years - and he squeezed his tired eyes shut and looked again, and the night hung silent around him, the invisible silver was still falling, the moon was already lower."

Happy Halloween

The One World We All Belong To

Poem of the One World 
by Jane Oliver (From her book,
A Thousand Mornings)

this morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.

Even though it wasn't 'floating along above the water', I was lucky enough to see and photograph this white heron when it visited briefly two weeks ago.

Would that we all could feel, for a little while, quite beautiful.

Would that in our one world, we all could feel a part of everything else.

Three Weeks Post-Op

No blog posts for three weeks because three weeks ago today, about right now, we were leaving for the hospital surgical center. After two years of procrastinating, it was finally time to just do it - get that new left knee.
Unlike before my shoulder replacement surgery seven and a half years ago, I didn't feel the need to update my will, add all the bequests of personal property, etc. etc. I felt more like, "Well, this will be a new adventure - no way to know what it is going to be like until I go through it." But I did feel positive about the surgery itself, and the outcome.

A little pre-op chat and pose with my surgeon. Love those paper gowns they use now.

First thing I remembered coming out from under after surgery was that I had been 'dreaming' of being on Tahiti. Tahiti?
Second thing was I must have commented about the music in the OR because someone asked me what I would like to hear. I said, "Willie Nelson". She said, "Do we have any Willie Nelson?" Some kind of country western music started playing, but it sure wasn't Willie. I was told all they had was Willie's Roadhouse. What I wanted was Always On My Mind or On The Road Again.
Oh, well, it wasn't much longer before I was in recovery and Dr. Ralston was telling Bud and me how well everything had gone and what to expect the rest of the day. At that point I was feeling pretty good, no pain, cheerful, funny. Bud asked if there was some way to always keep me in that frame of mind and I said I now understood how people could get hooked on drugs.

First week post-op I was cooking meals, doing laundry, taking my showers in Bud's bathroom because it is the kind you just step into, and going to physical therapy twice a week.

Second week, I had my post-op appointment with the doctor on Tuesday. He was less than happy with how stiff my knee was and wanted me to get to 90° on the CPM machine by Friday. I came home and got to 90° that afternoon. By Friday, I could get to 100°.

Which gets me to today, three weeks post-op. I'm up to 105° on the CPM, still using the walker, but also a cane as well as walking through the house without cane or walker. Still taking the pain meds, but only four times a day. Taking my shower in my own bathroom where I have to lift my leg over the tub to get into the tub/shower.
I feel ready to try driving myself to PT and the grocery - maybe some day this week. All-in-all, I feel pretty good, and I was right - it has been an adventure.

If You're Young At Heart

For those former little boys in my life, but especially my sons:

Small Boy

He picked up a pebble
and threw it into the sea.

And another, and another.
He couldn't stop.

He wasn't trying to fill the sea.
He wasn't trying to empty the beach.

He was just throwing away,
nothing else but.

Like a kitten playing,
he was practising for the future

when there'll be so many things
he'll want to throw away

if only his fingers will unclench
and let them go.

(by Norman MacCaig)

(My children are thinking of me this morning as I head off for some elective surgery - and I am thinking of them.)

Announcing Your Place

          Wild Geese
                      By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the small animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

A Cinquain For Canada Geese

Noble
Watchful, aware
Looking around the pond
Wondering what happened to
Their nest.

What? You don't care for my feeble attempt at poetry?

How about something from a real poet?

To Make A Prairie
  (By Emily Dickinson)

To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Croissants and Cafe Au Lait

I usually check the day old, discounted, bakery items when I'm at Walmart. I can easily by-pass the sweet stuff, but not breads and rolls and definitely not croissants, which are rarely on the racks. This week there was one package of four left, which flew into my cart. I didn't even have to think about it. I love croissants, but rarely buy them because of the calories. I can resist when they are full price, but not when they are marked down.
The first one I ate that evening, sliced in half, spread with Brummel and Brown, topped with swiss cheese slices and warmed/melted in the microwave. Mmm.
The second I had with my coffee yesterday morning in place of my usual maple and brown sugar frosted mini wheats. Afterwards, I thought, "I should have put some cream and sugar in that second cup of coffee."

So, this morning I did just that. First cup black, second cup with Sweet 'N Low and some half and half - not exactly café au lait, but close, anyway for me.

What my coffee with milk and sugar DID take me back to was when I first started drinking coffee. It was with my mother and just like I learned to drink hot tea, with milk and sugar. Except I drank hot tea that way when I was a child and did not start leaving out the milk/cream until I was an adult.

I was still drinking tea as my hot beverage of choice until the kids and I moved back home after Dad died. Even those three months we lived with Mom, I still had hot tea with breakfast while she had her coffee.

It wasn't until five years later when I was almost forty years old.....it was after Mom got her hand hurt and I started doing the milking for her.....

It was either when Mom got her hand caught in the wringer while washing clothes or when she got one of her fingers ripped open by the boar's tusk that I would get up at 5:00 a.m., drive the four miles to her place in order to get the milking done in time to go back home and get ready to go to work.
I would come to the house with the milk and she would say, "Don't you want a cup of coffee?" I think she felt it was the least she could offer for me doing the chores. Finally, one morning, I said yes. I had to load it up with sugar and the rich cow's milk in order to drink it, but after a few days, it began to taste good to me. The funny thing was I had always loved the smell of coffee and the taste of coffee flavored candy, ice cream, etc., just not the real thing.
Just like with tea, I would first cut out the milk, but still need sugar, eventually preferring my coffee black. (Though I still use sweetener in my hot tea and drink iced tea black.)

Tomorrow morning I will eat the last croissant, possibly with another adulterated second cup of coffee. Oh! If I really want to be fancy, I could use the French press to make the coffee. 😉

Closing Out September

Faceback offered me a video of my September Moments to share this morning, I declined, but decided to offer a bit more of my September here.

Beginning with - I read yesterday that September 2018 was the third wettest recorded in Iowa. My total for the month, emptied and noted from the guage on the deck, was 11.15 inches - most of which came down the first week in September. Now it sounds like this first part of October is going to also be WET. Too bad it couldn't have been spread out over the summer when the crops/farmers needed it instead of now, when they are trying to get in to the fields to harvest.

I've shared photos and written about the lovely Rose of Sharon bush that was here when we bought the place and died four years ago. Also about the new plants coming up in the same area the last two years and how one of them has started blooming.

That's it on the left - the same pink as the original bush. The bloom on the right, which looks more white, to me, is on one of the other new starts I let grow. Now, I'm looking forward to the third plant blooming, hopefully, next year, and seeing what color its flowers are. And I am reminded of the large bush at the southeast corner of Grandma Ridnour's large flower bed, close to the gate to the farm yard, that was tri-colored - pink, white and blue.

One nice afternoon I was sitting, reading, on the patio and enjoying the soft breeze and the melodious sounds from the Carson wind chime.

And the equally pleasant, to me, clack, clacking of the bamboo chimes.
The Carson chimes brought thoughts of the daughter who gave them to me.
The bamboo, memories of a long ago September on Nantucket where I first fell in love with their strange, aching, resonance.

September's photo file is full of pictures I took thinking I might use them somehow in a blog post.

Like the sweet, teeny flowers of the sprengeri (asparagus fern). This has always been a favorite plant - one I've had many of over the years - and first discovered its flowers when I used to have them as house plants, hanging in the windows on Tuck Corner and The Little House.

Or the stem of withered oak leaves found on the deck with its tiny unformed acorn, cut down before it had a chance to grow.

And the alien form lying on the neighbor's deck. What was that? I had to take a zoom photo and then enlarge it even more in order to see that it, too, was a cluster of oak leaves.

September brought a visit from a dear friend which included her sharing of what she had done with all the tee shirts from all the golf events she and her late husband had attended.
The logos from them were saved and made into bell pulls for his children, her brother and her. This is her's. The melon colored one near the top is from the 1991 Ryder Cup on Kiawah Island South Carolina. (We watched some of this year's Ryder Cup on T.V. last weekend.) Such a thoughtful and inventive way to preserve memories.

This year, September's weather was perfect for Balloon Days. And while none came right over our pond, some were close enough to take pictures of from our patio.

Just as the photo file is full of pictures of sunsets, clouds, flowers, sunrises, etc. too myriad to share, my desk is littered with quotes, snippets of poems and thoughts, memories and ideas for blog posts.
"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." (T.S. Eliot) Who couldn't write a whole blog post about that?

"Reason has no foothold at four or five in the morning; at those hours, reason sleeps and the mind breeds monsters: monsters of fear, of paranoia. So you toss and turn." (From Peter Robinson's Cold Is The Grave) For me it is more like two, three or four in the morning, but yes, I could get more than one blog post about the ugly, disquieting thoughts of those hours I toss and turn trying to go back to sleep.

One of the last days of September - putting away the chairs and cushions, etc. My car was under the patio roof. Bud came in from his run and said if I didn't move my car soon the cardinal climber would take it over - that it was already reaching for one of the tires. Ha!

It really has done well this year, in all four locations, but especially where it gets the early morning sun.

♪ The leaves of brown came tumbling down
Remember in September in the rain 
The sun went out just like a dying ember
That September in the rain ♪

A final closing thought about September - on its last day, I reached 100 'friends' on Facebook since joining nine years ago. You could say, compared to many, I'm slow. Or you might just say I'm selective. 😼

October's Bright Blue Weather?

First day of October - 7:13 a.m.

It's really foggy!

Instead of clearing, it's even foggier 2-1/2 hours later. Got worse instead of better.

Another 2-1/2 hours, it's starting to look a little brighter out ....

.... Yikes! Guess not, yet.

While I may be lamenting the cloudy, damp weather, it does make for some nice spider web photos.

"Oh suns and skies and flowers of June,
    Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year,
    October's bright blue weather."
  (October's Bright Blue Weather 
      by Helen Hunt Jackson)