I’ve been so busy with work, personal drama and the garden that I haven’t been reading much. Since books are a great passion of mine, not reading creates a hole in my personal well-being which must be corrected – and soon.
I joke that the only thing holding up the barn is my books and bookshelves. At one time, I could brag that I had read every book in the house except for the few in the unread pile next to my bed.
Between the craziness of my life and the fact that I now have a Significant Other who reads even more than I do (and passes his books on to me), I now have, at minimum, 200 unread books in this house. I have one whole bookcase dedicated to the unread, but now they’re spilling over. I’m also pretty sure there’s a passel of unread books in the nook under the stairs that I can’t get to because of the painting supply debris blocking access.
It’s crazy. And I love it.
Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona and Henry Huggins series were the first books that really rocked my world. However, it was Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy that lit the fire of a passion for good literature.
My preferred book is fiction, but in the past few years I’ve developed an appreciation for nonfiction. Whatever it is I’m reading, it must show proper respect for the power and beauty of words. No matter how interesting the subject, if it’s not written well, I don’t have the patience to read it.
I read to get lost in the dance of well-chosen words creating worlds of ideas. I do read some pop-lit, but only if the writer is a gifted story teller – King and Grisham, for instance. [Actually, King is a better writer than he gets credit for. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. Lisey’s Story is a thing of beauty as is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.]
The past few years, I’ve gone on genre jags. For awhile it was the “quirky” writers – Tom Robbins, Vonnegut, Christopher Moore, Jeannette Winterson. Then it was world literature – writers from Latin America, India, Russia, etc. A couple of summers ago, I completely devoured Susan Howatch’s Church of England series. Right now, I’m mixing it up.
I’ve got 4 books going at the moment, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s biography, a Paul Auster novel, some nonfiction about writer’s block and creativity, and essays on women writers and their dogs.
Those 4 books have been on my nightstand for more than a month. Normally, they would have been devoured in about a week.
The unread bookcase contains a plethora of marvelous stories – I know this because most of them have been pre-screened by HMOKeefe. For the most part, we agree on what constitutes a good book, but true to his gender, he tends to wax rhapsodic about some truly bad stuff (Moby Dick, for example).
I imagine myself sprawled in the garden with a book, a glass of iced tea, and the lazy drone of bees – a recreation of my childhood out-of-school summers when I could finally read as much as I wanted to without the annoying interruption of school. Please, please, let it be so. (Yes, I will have the annoying interruption of work, but some things can’t be avoided.)
I love talking about books and the ideas they hold. I can drone on and on and on about a book. Once I get going it’s nigh unto impossible to get me to shut up. Moreover, I also think it’s appropriate given my love of them that I use them as the bedrock for home decoration. They’re everywhere (except bathrooms) in bookcases, in stacks, on the floor, on tables, tucked under stairs, next to the exercise bike. Everywhere. And I do read them.
So? What are you reading?
I hate gravel.
I hate gravel.
Frank, the guy who built the barn, leveled off a hill, bulldozed it, trucked in gigatons of gravel, and then parked big rigs on it.
Breaking ground for a new garden is unbelievably difficult. Before I can do anything, I have to get the gravel out. This can only be done after drenching rains with the aid of a pick axe, a lot of determination, and hours of time.
Where I could, I made raised beds, but that’s not always possible. When I say Frank leveled the hill, I mean that in a broad sense. My yard is anything but level. If I tried to level it with raised beds, the roses would be level with my roof line.
I hate gravel.
I break ground, usually, in small increments – about 3×3 feet. It can take the better part of a day. The gravel is predictable. First I will have a thin layer of small gravel embedded in leaf debris and the topsoil that has managed to form in 25 years. Below that are huge chunks of gravel – the size of my fist or larger. That layer is a good 8 inches thick. When I get the ground broken enough to get to it, I pry one piece at a time out with the aid of a crow bar. It’s ‘orrible, it is, it is.
After all that, I cart the gravel out and dump it on the road. Then, one 40 lb. of soil at a time, I put earth where there had been geologic atrocities. Conservatively speaking, I have nearly 2 acres of gravel.
It’s ‘orrible, it is, it is.
When we put in the fence, we used a jackhammer. It’s bad. Really bad. I am not exaggerating. [I reserve the right to exaggerate in future stories, but it’s not necessary in this one.]
Souvenir rocks.
To be cursed with this gravel situation is an irony of sorts, because I like rocks. I have rocks scattered all over my house. Instead of tacky seashell wind chimes and t-shirts, I bring home rocks as souvenirs. (I also bring home shells, driftwood, seedpods and other pieces of nature that strike my eye.) They sit on bookcases, dressers, desks, my dashboard, in bowls, and on counters. I like rocks.
A few years ago, you couldn’t go anywhere without encountering a bin of polished rocks with words engraved in them. Man…I love those things. Words and rocks – it doesn’t get any better. I have a whole bag of them plus a bunch of them scattered around the house and one, very precious one, tucked into a medicine bag hanging from my rearview window. I like rocks. I really do, but I quit buying them when I learned whole mountains were being mined to satisfy my wordstone need.
I like rocks.
But more than rocks, I love mountains. I cannot fathom how anyone can defend mountaintop removal mining. They take a beautiful mountain, covered in magnificent trees, teeming with wildlife and reduce it to gravel.
The myth of it being good for the economy is usually cited. Balderdash. Coal companies are hauling far more coal out of here than anytime in history and simultaneously employing far fewer people to do it. And if coal is equivalent to economic prosperity, why are the largest coal-producing counties the poorest. The emperor has no clothes.
In a state that has suffered economic deprivation for generations. I understand the problems that could result should the practice be banned. But at what cost do we annihilate our mountains? When we destroy them, we not only lose them, but we lose our communities, our history, and our culture.
I love mountains.
When my son was born, my (ex)husband and I suffered a radical economic setback. Our goal was to climb from destitute to simply poor. It was another horrible situation. I could have sold the kid and ended the poverty.
I could have. Would I have? Nope. I believe the word is inconceivable.
More knowledgeable people than I have railed on the subject of mountaintop removal mining and I listen to them carefully. I can’t retain the facts and figures. I can’t discuss at any depth all of the issues surrounding the practice. I’m usually good at such things, but in this case I can’t get past the initial shock than anyone could think this is a good idea. All I know is I would no more destroy one of these mountains than I would sell my child.
I hate gravel. I like rocks. I love mountains.
W. Va. Fur and Root 