The peaches come from Andy Mariani’s orchard in Morgan Hill. They’re so fragrant that I can smell them all the way on the other side of the room. Andy has been growing stonefruit for many years and it shows in the color of his fruit, in the aroma, and the flavor. You can’t get peaches like these in Safeway. You have to come to Andy’s wooden country store on Half Road.
I come here often in the summer – maybe three times a week – and I always bend down to read the index cards set above the fruit.
The author of Cottage for Sale, Kate Whouley, at first strikes me as a little…mmmm, fastidious. But I want to keep reading when she admits to compulsively scanning the want ads in the Pennysaver. That’s how she finds her cottage, which she has trucked over to her small house on Cape Cod.
“The main thing is we get it over here onto the foundation,” her contractor says when she suggests adding the cottage to her house.
Sometimes grace appears in odd places, most recently for me in the Maisie Dobbs series. I never read mysteries but during a conversation with a bookseller she and I discovered that we both turn to Anne Lamott’s nonfiction when we’re feeling blue. When I asked what else she read to lift the spirits, she said the Maisie Dobbs novels. Ok, worth a shot.
To really love a book, you have to love the heroine,
