STUFF

The Luke 3 lines where John the Baptist says, "...whoever has two shirts should share with someone who has none..."make me think of a recent bestseller.

Here we are, digging for authentic JOY during the Christmas season when there is a book out there telling us to keep only things that "SPARK JOY" and to throw everything else away.

"The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The

Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing" by Marie Kondo has been a #1 bestseller for months. $10.19 on Amazon. 6,503 reviews -- most of them favorable.

You keep only items that "Spark Joy." You no longer roll your socks into a tight ball but you lovingly lay them flat, one on top of the other, and you tell them what a good job they've been doing, working hard to keep your feet warm, ...and so on...

You must throw everything away. Put it in black plastic bags and send it to the landfill. No leaving it up for grabs. No giving your joyless stuff to thrift. No passing it along to somebody else (Luke! Lookit!) including someone who actually may be able to use it. (John! You have your work cut out!).

This book says something to people, this idea of decluttering and going Zen with your stuff. I look around this room which is certainly cluttered with about a thousand books just sitting there. I see a wooden machine my granddaughter made in 6th grade. It is the most clever little apparatus: painted orange, big black propeller and a wire that will let it run along an energized third rail.
I will keep this.

I will also keep the model of an oil tanker up there on a high shelf. It is the kind of ship my husband went to sea on after he was kicked out of Columbia for a year after punching Dean?

There is a little jar of multicolored sand from the Negev. Lord. I can't remember who brought it back but it has been on one shelf or another forever. Then I see the glass pyramid-shaped prism with the Kremlin etched in it. That certainly is a treasure and brings JOY because I remember my father-in-law bringing it home from one of his frequent trips behind the Iron Curtain.

Goodness. There is an abacus! How did that get in here? We've had it forever, also, propped up on one bookshelf or another. It has moved around with us. Is it happy in Vermont? Brings JOY? I'll have to think.

This is only one room. It will take me days and weeks to go through everything, applying the SPARK JOY test.  Kondo tells us this is no good. It must happen all at once and it must happen FAST. 

How hard this is, Luke. We have such tortured relationships with stuff. Take the shirt. Don't tell Marie.

ANOTHER TRUE CONFESSION

A couple of days ago, my friend, James, slipped me a little
list of suggested reading:

     Isaac Bashevis Singer -- Autobiography
     Saul Bellow -- The Victim
     V. Nabokov -- Search for Lolita

He is a great reader but, hello, there is no way I'll get to any
of this. I read Saul Bellow years ago. Singer, ditto. I read a lot of Nabokov also a long time ago and remember little. Mainly, I think of the passage about N. seeing letters in various colors in "Speak Memory." Also, I hear James Mason reading a book on tape: "Lo, Lo, Lowleetahhh..." On Sunday, I came across some sparkly heart-shaped sun glasses and I thought of Lolita, the movie. But mainly, all is a blur, like everything else in my reading life.

James. Your list is too serious, too real. What you don't know is
I've gone down the tubes to junk reading and binge watching
TV series such as "Orange is the New Black," and the English
and Swedish versions of "The Girl Who..." After that, I am
re-reading the trilogy (now in the first third of "...Dragon Tattoo")
and it is like new! Ha. The aging brain does not recall much of
any recent reading.

More reveal: I bought from Amazon Kindle and read "Make Me" the latest Reacher by Lee Child. In this one Reacher goes on with his heroic monologues and the action is a little bizarre but clever and he does seem to like a girl so that's a little dimension. He has his toothbrush but no change of clothing, taking traveling light to the extreme. He uses cash only and I'm not sure how he gets it. ATM card? He doesn't drive. He takes trains and buses. Flying requires too much ID.

I've taken a break from Regency Romance but will probably reread when I need some happy endings. I've said this: some of
the writing in this genre is v. good. Much is bad but what isn't?
I know. The books on James's list require thought and effort and that seems so beyond me now. I have notes on the good stuff but forget to look at them.

Here is a question: is all reading a waste of time? Is only some
reading a waste of time? Is watching TV, looking out the window,
driving around doing errands a waste of time? Isn't it all just
living life?

WORKING MY WAY THROUGH A DITCH

As the DeSoto wound it way along country roads, I was
in the back seat, making myself carsick, scanning the ditches
for wildflowers and strawberries.

In the woods, I knew where to find Star of Bethlehem and
Bloodroot -- pretty but makes a messy bouquet. I looked for
Jack-in-the-Pulpit and lady's slipper. I dug up violets and
day lilies and planted them by the chimney of our house on
Spruce Street.

This morning, about 70 years after the above, I walked to the top of the dirt road, clippers in hand, hunting for loosestrife, the yellow whorled, but found only two plants this year and let them be. Usually I come back with feverfew but there is only one in bloom and that, too, can stay. Where is the tansy by the end of our driveway? How come this stuff moves around, will o the wisp?
Not to get too heavy on the metaphor, but change is, well,
change.

The road has been unchanged for as long as we've lived on it
and that's at least 45 years. We know land is owned on either
side and all it will take to change everything is for another hedge funder to buy it up and build a big testament to
success. They do that, even here on this island, although a belated town zoning law passed confining height and size, but that's relative.

Along the road, there is a deer path wide enough for a golf cart and occasionally I see deer using it. Skunks abound in the neighborhood and so do wild turkeys, although I do not know why the skunks haven't eaten all their eggs. 

A stream rushes downhill to the ocean and at its end, a patch of watercress thrives. It has always been there, along with the mint.
Beach peas grow alongside rosa rugosa with their rosy hips, rich in vitamin C. At wading depth when the tide is out, we gather mussels
attached to the rocks, the mussels also coming and going at storms' whim. Periwinkles, not everyone's choice, are also there.

Along the path to the water grow beach plums, some years better
than others. The dainty white blossoms of early Spring give way
to hard green pellets that ripen and grow into plum-colored, well, plums. Making jelly from them is a labor of love, boiling, straining, and messing with the magenta goo -- you need an awful lot of plums to produce a batch worth the trouble.

If you have an itch for candle making, you can use the bayberries
growing along the path but many of those bushes have been muscled out by the junk rose and other invaders. I don't know anybody who has ever made a bayberry candle but the berries are out there, just in case.

Our first house was out on the main road, about a half-mile north of where we are now. Amy Charak lived in an old saltbox across from us -- Amy, as in "Once in love with..." She asked me if we were rich and I told her no. "I hate it when people aren't rich," she said. I invited her and Walter to dinner and asked what she might like:  "Lamb chops." I saw her with a colander full of raspberries
and wondered where she got them. "I'm not going to tell you."
That was Amy.

Up the North Road to the end, then bear right and go past Polly Hill to a driveway on the left with a little sign saying "Eggs." Right there, now covered in summer grasses, is the spot where Bettyann
and Helen dug up jonquils by stealth of night. I planted the bulbs
and now, all these years later, I have a fragrant testimony to sisterhood and bold girls gleefully stoned.

GOOD HEAVENS, IT'S JUNE

Back from Turkey after an excellent trip with a most compatible
group. Praises to the organizers and to our Turkish guide as well
as to the breathtaking Turkish countryside. A good part of the
experience was the Bosphoros with its insane shipping four deep
as you look across to Asia. Plus there is a river running through it,
beneath, at surprising speeds.

So the Bosphoros, the Sea of Marmara -- that inland sea which
connects with the Aegean -- and the fabulous Turkish countryside
throughout Izmir. It was too early for everything to have ripened
but we saw lush fields planted with fruit trees and olive trees
marching to the tops of steep hills and mountains. This central
valley seems to go on and on and there are scarved women in the fields, weeding and planting, stooping low. The men are either on
tractors or in the shady taverna...

                         

SPRING AGAIN

It's Spring again...birds on the wing, again...

Around here it has been a long, hard winter and snow lies
in the corners of every field. Huge piles at the edges of parking
lots won't melt until May and the poor robins will find it hard
to tug a worm from ground frozen six feet down.

So that's the weather which has allowed for a lot of time spent
at the end of the couch. Basketball is winding down. Today
was baseball opening day, thank goodness. The sound of
baseball can occupy us day and night well into October!

Meanwhile, my reading has sunk to unfathomed depths.
Now and then, something worthwhile will get my attention
but that gets harder by the minute. The last bit of so-called
literature I read was "The Invention of Wings" by Sue Monk
Kidd and I didn't like it all that much. Set in the slave-holding
deep south, it follows the lives of several house slaves and
their masters ending in the abolitionist communities of the north
where Quakers and other radicals struggle for the cause. It is
about women finding their voice and about lifelong struggles for
freedom. What I'm saying here isn't quite fair to the book: it
is a lot better than I'm making it seem.

I've almost made it through tax time although I cringe when the
phone rings, thinking it might be the accountant with questions
I can't answer. Pure sloth makes me want to wave a magic wand
over all such tedious matters to make them go away. 

The best way to escape this slough is to get moving and I will
do that before long when I travel to Turkey on a group trip arranged by UVM. If a dip into Asia Minor won't do it, heaven knows what will. This is ambitious and not at all tame. For that: perhaps a garden tour to Scotland?  Oh, well. We will see.

HAVE READ, AM READING, MIGHT READ, MIGHT NOT READ

A pile of "real" books teeters at the edge of a table too small to
hold them. Some I got recently for Christmas, others have been
sitting there, waiting for something to happen.

Truth is, I prefer reading books on various electronic devices and
cringe at the thought of propping up, say, Hermione Lee's excellent life of Penelope Fitzgerald (500 pages) although I longed for this
book more than any other. I whip through virtual pages, fighting
with the location and/or page locator, forget to bookmark, then can't remember the author or the title on the vast display provided via
the Kindle app. Still, I persist and whip out the iphone to read in
the supermarket checkout line. So many books, so little time!

For a book group, I read "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"
by Anthony Marra, an American who spent time in Chechnya and Grozny and by way of some miraculous genius, wrote an impossible, overwhelming novel. Who knows how this kind of thing happens? Senseless, stupid wars and squalor both moral and
physical? What a harrowing read -- so powerful that took a break and read an old P.D. James, just to ground myself.

Back again in the Caucuses during the 1990s into the early 2000s with no resolution to the Chechen conflicts, Marra finds a way
out of the book. Inspired by work of Russian journalist Anna
Politkovskaya, (assassinated presumably for reporting she did from Chechnya) Marra became interested in the region when he was a college student in St. Petersburg.

So I got a book about Politkovskaya and maps of the Caucasus and delved to try to get some sense of the history and background of
this crazy place I knew nothing about. Thank you, Wikipedia.

The next book group book, a paperback this time, is "The Lowland" by Jhumpa Lahiri set in Bangladesh at the time of
partition as it moves from the 1960s, across generations, to the present in Rhode Island. Lahiri often writes about cultures crossing and changing. I always admire her characters and in this book, I especially liked descriptions of lowlands, of grasses and marshes and estaurine study. I didn't love the book but it did lead me into
an exploration of the history of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India
which I wrote down and now can't find.

I downloaded C. P. Snow's "The Light and the Dark" book 2 in
Snow's "Strangers and Brothers" series set at Cambridge during the 1920s and '30s.  I will read this for another book group where I will be a guest. Heaven knows how they chose this one. Better they
should have picked "The Man Who Loved China" the brilliant
biography by Simon Winchester of the polymath and nutty Cambridge scientist and explorer, the late, great Joseph Needham.

So that's book groups. Now to the pile on the table: As I said earlier, I look forward to "Penelope Fitzgerald, A Life" by Hermione Lee. I hoped for this book for Christmas and there it
was! How sympathetic: Fitzgerald's great writing career didn't even begin until she was in her '60s.

Also for Christmas: "We Are Not Ourselves" by Matthew Thomas.
I'd heard of this novel but know nothing about it. Family saga. Irish. Set in Queens. 600 pages. Great reviews and on everybody's end of year best of 2014, etc. etc. I plan to read. Good title.

"Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Paperback. Bestseller. A novel I've known about but would not have owned
were it not for Christmas. I heard Adiche interviewed on NPR
a while ago and was intrigued by her surreal experience being an African becoming an American with racism and stereotypes in both places. I will read this. Thank you whoever gave it to me. I forget.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. I don't know this novel or author but my daughter-in-law says she enjoyed it so I will read it. Paperback.

Gail Godwin's "Evenings at Five" loaned to me by a friend who
thought I'd be touched by the title story. A husband and wife have
their ritual drink every afternoon at 5. He, of course, dies, so this is a sad story. Especially sad because I made Michael a perfect martini -- Absolute Vodka with two cocktail onions -- and delivered it to him (often in bed) at exactly 6 pm. Love and death. Maybe too
close to the bone. We'll see.

"Tracks" by Robyn Davidson is the Australian version of the American Cheryl Strayed's "Wild." Add several camels and a 1,700 mile trek across the Australian desert and you have a companion story: young woman tackles impossible journey, survives (somehow) and the book gets made into a movie.  Same setup: meet every peril once: sand storm, bad snake, killing cold and thirst, lost compass, sore feet, sunburn, etc. etc. The Davidson book is surprisingly well written. I did see the movie and it wasn't all that great.

"Pastrix" by Lutheran preacher Nadia Bolz-Weber a tattooed, foul mouthed ex junkie, alkie, and stand-up comic, with perfect qualifications to become an ordained minister and founder of the
"House for all Sinners and Saints" in Denver. What a bold girl!
What a shock to the everyday clerical community Nadia must have been. She is devout, devoted and amazingly hardworking and funny. Her ideas of how religion should go and how church should be certainly resounds. With Nadia, Christianity is alive and well.

"By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the New York Times Book Review" is the kind of collection I enjoy. I love lists. I always want to know what other people are reading. Here is an example: Gary Shteyngart says the best book he has read recently is "Middlemarch." Don't you love it? He says he likes stories where people suffer a lot and says he has a weakness for funny characters who can't shut up. Carl Hiaasen's "Bad Monkey" was his favorite book of 2013 and he read Nabokov's "Pnin" so many times the book no longer has a spine. Oh, and Shteyngart's
own "Super Sad True Love Story" is on my list but so far I don't have it. Maybe just as well.

I've read most of Kate Atkinson's novels, including "Case Histories" and "Started Early, Took my Dog." I got "Life After Life" (500+ pages paperback) for my birthday in December and so far
it sits on the little table. Atkinson says the book is about "being English," but it begins with a young girl killing Adolf Hitler in
the early '30s, so go figure that one. We will see. Maybe if I
have this book alone, when nothing else is around. Desert island, maybe.

"My Own Country" a memoir by Abraham Verghese has been lent by my friend, Sue. She loves this book so I'd better read it. Set in Johnson City, Tennessee, it is the story of AIDS in a conservative community and the work of a dark skinned outsider. Verghese went on to write "Cutting for Stone" and "The Tennis Partner," among others.

For Christmas, between us, Sam and I ordered three copies of
Philip Klay's "Redeployment", a collection of short stories that won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction. Klay is a former Marine
who served in Iraq and people say Klay writes it like it is. I will certainly read this, almost did a week ago. Will send a copy to Roger and Sam will keep his. We've done this before. I get the same thing he gets for me.

Exhausting, isn't it? There is another pile across the room, stacked
up near the TV. Let's skip those at least for now. Happy New Year.