I had trouble naming this column. My first idea was RUNAWAY MOM but that makes me sound flighty. For a while I called it FEELING BETTER but that made me sad. While trying to figure this out, I had the chance to go to Newfoundland with a group of women. Talking with these women (none of whom I’d met before) cracked open a shell that I’d formed around myself. The women on this trip didn’t have issues around motherhood — or at least they didn’t have the same issues I did.
A Spool of Blue Thread and Just-picked Peaches
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.
Placeholder Post — Words Well Chosen Post
This is a placeholder for the first words well chosen post.
Cottage for Sale and August Tomatoes
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.
Maisy Dobbs and O.D.s
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,