During the past year I have fled to the summer house countless times to reside in this little corner of the room by the window, secure in its confines.
Whether weathering
storms of winter snows and spring rains or bathed in bright sunshine, I hid and
read.
As the
pandemic raged, my world became smaller; but my worldview became bigger.
The library
shelves behind me hold dozens of my books, and I have read them all – ranging from
an illustrated hardcover of J. K. Rowling’s children’s book “Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer’s Stone,” a special Christmas gift from my best friend, to a giant glossy picture book of Francesca Premoli-Droulers’ “Writers’ Houses”, a $50
splurge at Barnes & Noble that I bought decades ago with the generous
Christmas bonus from a kind publisher.
I vacillated
in the store whether to put the money toward the household budget or purchase
this one-of-a-kind tome that was way beyond my means.
Today I
think I made the right decision.
Sequestered,
yet set free, I lived this past year in the pages of my books.
In my mind’s
eye, I sat at a school desk in Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
holding a magic wand, or at Karen Blixen’s writing desk in Kenya gazing “Out of
Africa.”
I delved
into gardening books, planning rows of summer vegetable plants that would
sustain my family despite supermarket shortages.
I travelled
to the “The Country of the Pointed Firs” with Sarah Orne Jewett, and I became a
writer who spends three months in a small coastal town in nineteenth-century
Maine, or moved into the cabin that Henry David Thoreau built on the shore of “Walden”
Pond.
But most of
all, I pondered “The Divine Hours” by Phyllis Tickle, praying for an end to the
plight of a people on a planet in pain.
