Featured Refresh
Text & Image
How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
The weather turned much colder and time to prepare for the next season. Reminded me I’d taken this picture of “The last Chapter of the Ant and The Grasshopper”. I am working on canning the last of the quince and the cornelian cherries... the abandoned crop at the farm...both kind of metaphors for the feeling many around me seem to have. We’re older, not in vogue, too much trouble in the eyes of some... yet this time has shown me beauty and importance in the tiniest of things. I have 4 friends who are ready to leave this “earthly” plane... too much pain, too little hope...life is getting too hard for too few rewards...Too much chaos, too much hate around us... there are moments when I get it, but I’m struggling on the other end... I have too many projects, too many things I want to get to, and I keep thinking people will get it! I’ve been tracking back the kernels of truth that underlie so many beliefs that are driving the polarization of the nation right now. Maybe I am the naive one, head in the sand, rose colored glasses...hard to believe ignorance, greed and hate can so easily be spread... i guess it’s the evolutionary leftover - our reward for climbing out of the water - to be constantly on the alert for danger so we can survive another day...
September 22, 2020
Text Only
How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
As a lifelong bibliophile, I have often relied upon books to buoy me through difficult times. Since March 2020, when the pandemic first began to alter all that we knew and loved, books have been my passport to safely visit people and places without mask, worry or guilt. I have walked the streets of Paris with Chief Inspector Gamache in Louise Penny’s All the Devils Are Here, found myself quaking in a remote mountain estate in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s creepy Mexican Gothic and assisted in solving assorted mysteries confronting a Kent retirement village in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. Fredrik Backman transported me to a small town in Sweden in his heartwarming Anxious People, Marjan Kamali invited me to 1950s Tehran in The Stationery Shop, and Lucy Foley introduced me to a dubious cast of characters gathered on a fictional island off Connemara in The Guest List. Even a deadly pandemic cannot restrict travel by book nor discourage the awakening of imagination through literature.
January 29, 2021