Today being gray, I stayed in bed a bit longer, watching the rain and ruing the loss of my early walk. I don't mind walking in the rain, but the morning seemed built for other things...later, I thought, I will put on my raincoat and go collect Alexander for the afternoon. Good thought: immediately the rain and wind picked up, or rather shot down, bringing a torrent over the garden and terrace.
In bed, I made a list or two, one practical and one fantastic, checked my phone for messages, then read another story in a book I had bought through the Friends of the Library sale, just re-opened in a new Covid way.
I should explain that for months, the town library had been closed...in your towns, too, I am sure...until summer, when they'd found a way to have us order books online and pick them up outside safely. It helped me a little, but really I am more of a browser, and so I didn't use the welcome service much. Then, last week, the Friends of the Library sent a message saying that they had found a way to reinvent their store, semi-virtually, and sent pages of titles they had for sale...all very inexpensive and all supporting the library, of course. Many were new or scarcely read; lots were interesting. I scrolled through and picked out more than a few, including Margaret Drabble's stories, which have become my bedside reading. When they notified me that my order was ready, I went to the back of the library, where a window in a glass wall had been installed, and at the mention of my name out came a bag with my books. I was proud of them and of me for getting these next weeks' reads.
You will notice on top of the pile above a book which came from John May himself, upstairs, a history of his family which begins at the beginning of time, just about, and which I have been reading chapter by chapter each afternoon, absorbing the chronicle of not only his family odyssey, but everyone's. It is a fascinating book, part history, part fiction...both well-told. I am glad to read it slowly.
As it happens, about the time John's gift arrived, I'd also picked up Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice Toklas, which somehow I'd missed the whole of in college. But my Paris obsession now required it. I alternated his with hers, enjoying the juxtaposition of language, history and intention. I was sorry to finish Gertrude and Alice as quickly as I did, so I turned to a biography of Stein done by a woman I sort of knew. Like a balloon deflating, I plowed through a while, then put it down. Having been lifted by the prose of the two before, the pedanticism of this one made me wonder why I had spent 40 years in academia reading such. It was well-researched and informative...I will give it that...and someday wanting information in its drier format I might pick it up again.
Meanwhile I have my Friends' books to enjoy.
This morning's read was a Drabble story about a woman, an actress, I think, although her occuption wasn't much part of the plot...wait, perhaps it was, now I think of it, the whole motive of the piece...hmm. Anyway, she fell in love with a house, a Dower House attached to a titled family pile crumbling over the centuries, wasted by the unwieldy marriages of two lines of sort-of nobles who couldn't, frankly, get it together. But that's not the story itself, which, as I said, is about a woman falling in love with an old house, disrepair and all. She doesn't particularly want to fix it up; she likes the melancholy, as she admits, in which the house and lands enclose her. In the end, she has had the illumination to marry one or the other of the men on whom it has been entailed; she isn't sure whether she wants to marry the men or marry the men for the place.
Yes, well. I could understand that, even though I probably would not follow her example if put to the test. A house inhabits one as much as one inhabits it. I know that from long experience with the places I have lived.
A place can call to you, not only from outside, but from inside, its call a murmur as well as a haunting. The choice today to be an inside day was a call from place, weather notwithstanding.
After reading, I went into the kitchen to do the next best thing: cooking. Yesterday, I had gone to the New Hope Market, a little place along the back road to Hillsborough and places north that has breakfast, lunch and produce from local farms. I meant to pick up eggs and butter and whatever roots would make a good soup, but on the glassed shelves I found lovely zucchini and tiny eggplants and grabbed them as well. So soup began and the roasted finds with a little tomato from my neighbor Betsy's garden and some basil that has so far withstood bugs and cool nights; alas the parsley has not.
From the stove and oven now come inside-warm aromas. I think I have just enough time
to make Alexander something chocolate for his afternoon treat.
Or read another chapter of The Mays of Alamann's Creek.
