Since I am reading this serially--one chapter a month (conveniently there are chapters one for each month of the year), I both want to race to the next chapter and wait and prolong the experience. I so very much enjoy her writing, and maybe it is the nature of how this is presented almost as a diary, I feel like I am chatting with a friend. Gladys Tabor has such a charming way of moving from topic to topic. She moves from one thing to the next and they might not necessarily be related, but it flows perfectly--just as it is to chat with a good friend with whom you are catching up with on all the news since you last spoke.
There are lots of interesting things I could tell you about--like those buttermilk pancakes she begins the chapter with and syrup-making, but I will just share a few excerpts that I particularly liked, and I think you'll understand why they really stuck out.
"I have been sorting books, this being a February job. I make a firm resolve annually to keep poetry in one part of the bookshelves, country books in another, classics on a low level for easy reaching, reference books very near my desk, fiction by itself. The way it ends is that I have two of my beloved Beverley Nichols books [I wonder which two were her favorites?] right in with Emily Dickinson and Wuthering Heights. As an organizer I was a washout. Should Keats's Letters be with Katherine Mansfield or along with Keats's poetry and The Making of a Poet? And where does James Thurber go? I do a lot of happy random reading while I am at this job; otherwise the results are just more confusion."
***
I find myself doing this right now, too!
"Finally, I went outside to see if I could detect a hint of spring in the air, even at night. It was very still: the smoke from the chimney stood straight up in the air. The moon shed cold silver on the meadow, I remembered that Hal Borland had told me that the Indians called it the hunger moon. Looking up at it, I thought how fitting the name was, for I hungered for spring, and wide-open roads, and an unfrozen windshield."
I had to look up "hunger moon" in the Farmer's Almanac and apparently it is also known as the Full Snow Moon. "The heaviest snows fall in February." Yeah, apparently that must be what we are experiencing right now as a matter of fact . . .
***
And more wisdom that gives me much to think about. This excerpt is in response to her grandson--when she asked what he was doing--sitting quietly with his stuffed bear and cat--"jus' loving".
" . . . busyness doesn't seem to be connected with wealth or poverty, city or country. I haven't in years known anyone who had real leisure. I should define leisure, for I do not mean just giving up ad sinking into lethargy; I mean time to think, to read, to hear music, to walk in snowy woods, to drop in on a loved friend for no reason at all but to see her. I should, perhaps, call it constructive leisure. I do notice that often illness is connected with what we call so lightly 'overdoing'."
If I have not yet tempted you, too, to go in search of this book, or some other writing by Gladys Tabor, I'll try again in March! Maybe rather than portioning off my time with her writing, I should pick up another book by her that I own?