One good line — from The Glass Room, a murder mystery that takes place at a writing retreat.
It’s been a long week in the Pacific Northwest. After weeks of rain and gloom, winter arrived with a powerful storm of snow, sleet, snain and ice.
Yes, snain is a form of weather, as is graupel.
Power, pipes, peace of mind — all weighted with weather.
Life closed up: schools, shops, even postal delivery (the horror!), and the world seemed to shrink.
Maybe you’ve felt this too?
In a storm, life inches along quietly like a slow moving film that turns your focus narrow, intimate. Much like how a fever can clear the body and break open the mind, winter turns life crystalline. Snow gathers knowingly on a ledge. A muffled silence gives every sound meaning so that the furnace ticks, the refrigerator hums, and the turn of a page cracks through the room. Nothing is everything, is cocooned, is a secret sort of holy.
In this quietude, I burned through books. Mysteries, novels, essays, poems . . . tick tick tick. Finishing one, I reached quickly for another. A binge, a feast, I gobbled. Maybe it was the haze of storm that turned me greedy. But it was also a sort of rapture in that every book — even the mediocre ones — were full of delights. One good line after another.
From Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship, by Catherine Raven:
It’s a safe assumption that any plant called ‘weed’ goes through life with low expectations.
From The Hurting Kind, a poem by Ada Limón:
I have always been too sensitive, a weeper
from a long line of weepers.
I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.
From I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, by Nora Ephron:
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter . . . Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
Maybe this is the gift of stormy weather: to sit quietly, pleasantly absorbed, thankful for the companion of a good book. One good line is all it takes.
What are you reading? Send me a line!