12/21: tba

I haven't recorded my good thing for 12/21 yet, but please feel free to post a good thing from your day in the comments!

12/20: spoken word & rediscovery

I really enjoy live reading-aloud, but I often have trouble with audiobook recordings. I get impatient. My mind wanders. I don't know what to do with the rest of myself as I'm listening. But I downloaded The Scarlet Letter for my iPod, and I've been enjoying listening to it as I've been walking this week. Maybe it's ushering in a new era of audiobook wonderfulness for me. (I hope so.)

I sometimes feel a little sad about books like The Scarlet Letter (and I consider The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the same camp): they are such amazing novels, but people often first (and only) encounter them as assigned reading in high school, when many of us are probably too young to appreciate them or their radicalness. Part of me is sad that I'm not discovering The Scarlet Letter for the first time as an adult; but part of me is glad that it's possible to rediscover a book and find it so different after so many years, largely because one's self is so different in so many ways. And yet there's also the sense of the familiar: I remember particular sentences from my first reading of The Scarlett Letter in 1985! And I even remember where in my parents' house I was sitting when I read them.

12/19: definitively

I didn't grow up with bluebirds as a common sight in Pennsylvania. They're more plentiful here in Arkansas, and I never get tired of seeing them. I always think it's special. At this time of year they're often more apparent on the ridge than in other seasons, and Chris said he saw them earlier this week. So I've been keeping my eyes peeled for them, and there have been a couple of times when I thought that maybe perhaps I caught a glimpse of one flying across the yard. But today I saw some for certain, and I was dazzled all over again by their brilliant blue.

12/18: stretching

Ever since Thanksgiving break my body has been unusually sore: I think it may have been the combination of walking-more-than-usual in Memphis and sitting-more-than-usual during the drive to and from Memphis. In any case, my back somehow got out of whack, and I knew that doing some yoga would help, but in the end of the semester flurry of things I never made time. This morning I did, and it felt thoroughly good.

12/17: stocked up

When I finished Trollope's Fixed Period earlier this week, I realized that I didn't have a novel lined up to read next. So today we went to the bookstore in Little Rock, and I bought four: Henry James' Wings of the Dove, Wilkie Collins' Rogue's Life, and two novels by Louisa May Alcott (Work and A Long Fatal Love Chase). I don't know which one I'll start first, but it's always great feeling to be excited about opening a new cover and diving in.

12/16: sights from the table

Our dinner table is placed along large floor-to-ceiling windows. We both sit on the same side of the table so we can share the view of the willow oak at the bottom of the hill, the fields below our house, and the ridge in the distance. This morning as we ate breakfast we saw three deer jump past the windows as they crossed our yard. And this evening as we ate dinner we watched a pink and blue sunset slowly change to violet.

12/15: from the sky

I walked across campus today at about 11 o'clock. The air was cold, but the sun was strong and the sky was clear and blue. As I passed by some tall willow oaks, the wind made lots of little leaves--now orange and brown--flutter to the ground. It felt like I was in a snowstorm of sorts: leafstorm? It was lovely, and I wished it could have gone on and on.