In the nineteen-nineties, following the country’s rapid industrialization and the movement of its people from rural areas to the cities, the trash dumps at the cities’ edges overflowed. Poor families lived near the dumps; many of them picked through the garbage for plastics and metals to sell. . . Excerpt from The New Yorker, March 9, 2020.
Familiar Things is a fictionalized story of the day to day life of a young teen living in squalor. It depicts life and its hardships on Flower Island, the fictional site of Seoul’s massive landfill. Steps away from the profoundly foul landfill, a shantytown has been created from discarded items and populated by the poorest of the Seoul’s poor.
Although Korea now has a great system of recycling, it wasn’t always true. In the “old days”, deliveries of unwanted items from the mainland arrived three times a day in caravans of dump trucks heaving construction scraps to spoiled food; roadkill to pots, pans, broken glass, and used clothing. Standing at the ready, garbage pickers launch themselves on the garbage heap to scavenge any item that can be sold for recycling.
Let’s clear the air; pun intended. You will feel like taking a shower every time you set down the book. But this isn’t a story about the garbage. Flower Island is just geography. It’s about a child nicknamed Bugeye and the people that populate his life on Flower Island. It is a sad story but engaging. In a country comprised of haves and have nots. This is a story of have nots and the way they make a life for themselves. The living conditions are abysmal but the only time they are made to feel less than human occur when they need to head to the mainland.
Bugeye used to live in Seoul with his parents before his father was taken away for a crime to a “re-education center”. He and his mother lived in a hillside slum where she worked as a street vendor. One day, a friend of Bugeye’s father offered them a new life on Flower Island with him. It meant a further drop in social status but promised more income as a garbage picker.
“It’s just a shack, but you won’t have to pay rent. You’ll make three times what you make now. Where else are you going to find a deal like that?”, said Baron Ashura.
So Bugeye and his mother found themselves, like all the unwanted items tossed off the mainland, riding on the back of a dump truck crossing the bridge and heading onto Flower Island. An addition, built of scavenged wood and linoleum, was added to the side of Baron’s shanty. Amenities – none. Bugeye’s mother moved in with Baron. Baldspot, Baron’s unwanted ten-year-old son moved in with Bugeye and the two boys quickly grew close.
Baldspot, unloved by his father, won my heart. Finding no love at home, Baldspot has lead a secret life much like little Gavroche in Les Miserable. He now has a hyung, an older”brother”!
Big for thirteen-years-old, Bugeye easily passes as fifteen and is expected to become a picker alongside his mother. But he is also a kid, and he finds no one objects if he doesn’t go to work once in a while. So when Baldspot decides to share his secret life, Bugeye follows him into a spellbinding story about Flower Island. The magical realism blends with reality as smoothly as a chocolate/vanilla soft serve ice cream cone.
[Baldspot] gestured to follow him. Where’re you going?
“It’s top secret”, he whispered. “If Dad or the other grownups find out, we’ll get in trouble.”
Julie gets the harebrained idea to go backpacking, alone and inexperienced, in the Acadia National Park and soon learns she’s bit off more than she can chew. She becomes lost and after a futile search by rescue teams is declared dead a year later. Her memorial service brings the three remaining members of the clique together. Elise can’t bring herself to believe Julie is dead. Julie has always pulled a disappearing act only to reappear when she feels like it. Molly and Mae mourn Julie’s death while Elise holds out hope she will see Julie again.
Two years to the day she disappeared, Julie is found sitting on her front porch. She is wearing the clothes she disappeared in and claiming to have no memory of the events of the past two years. Mae, the wealthiest of the group, arranges a get-away to a remote and bizarrely designed hotel to welcome Julie back into the fold and reunite the clique.
The next morning, the old Julie with the bouncy curls and fashion model skin arrives for breakfast. And still no one asks what is going on with her. And she offers no explanation. The days pass. The atmosphere in the hotel is changing. The staff acts spooked. There are sounds in the walls. The thermostat in Elise’s room seems possessed always resetting itself to freezing. Some days Julie appears bedraggled. Oher days she seems infused with instant health. Still no one mentions it.
Fifteen years ago, Louise Penny published Still Life, the first book in a new cozy murder mystery series. Still Life introduced readers to a mystical Québec village called Three Pines and to a cast of quirky characters. Each book can be read independently and enjoyed but to fully understand the main characters, I encourage reading the series in order.
Early the next morning the phone rings at Olivier’s home. A passerby has spotted a body on the floor in the Bistro!
The resort’s groundskeeper, clearing overgrown horse paths, leads to the discovery of the Hermit’s cabin and the bloody scene of the crime. What they find inside the cabin is even more baffling than the murder and again raises questions about Olivier’s honesty and character. Could this beloved resident of Three Pines have a dark side?
Gamache struggles to separate his deep feelings for Olivier with his uncanny ability to recognize when someone is not telling the truth or withholding information. He so very much wants to exonerate Olivier but every new clue in someway implicates him.
Something might be stalking you, and crawl right up behind
We meet Alex struggling with why she made the concession to put her boyfriend’s needs above her own and move to the big city. Brad’s high-flying big city career has made him a demanding narcissist. Alex pines for a return to her life working in nature. Her achievements in conservation in the city haven’t met all her needs. While Alex is dealing with her failing relationship, she attends a conservation award ceremony and is nearly killed by a rabid anti-conservationist shooter. Rattled to her core, she jumps at the chance to leave the city to takeover a wolverine study in the Rocky Mountains wilderness of Montana.
Most of the residents of the fictional town of Bitterroot, like other cloistered towns, disdain outlanders. The recent creation of the Land Trust for Wildlife Conservation has everyone’s dander up. The land, the site of an abandoned large-scale ski resort, had been openly used by the locals to graze livestock and hunt game. The land is now off-limits. The ban is observed by some and abused by others.
Emily St. John Mandel captivated me in her dystopian novel, Station Eleven, published in 2014, about the destruction of civilization by a flu pandemic. Spooky prescient now laid against our real world crisis with Covid-19.
I will admit I have struggled for some time to review this latest book. Counterculture, ghostly appearances, and Ponzi schemes are far outside my comfort zone to discuss with any validity. Yet in the end, I must say I enjoyed the book but find it hard to tell you why exactly….. Collectively, a multitude of characters spend time pondering questions. How did I find myself in this situation and not see it coming?
Bennie discovers a book filled with crumbling newspaper articles written by emancipated slaves and published in the Southwestern Christian Advocate. Each article a desperate plea for help in locating family members ripped apart by the auction block. This discovery becomes the catalyst to encourage Bennie’s students to learn of their own legacy and take pride in the part they play in passing that legacy on to the next generation.
That’s it! All you are going to get from me. I’ll leave you with a clue to the book’s title. Hannie, Juneau Jane and Lavinia travel on a long dangerous and complicated journey. They seek refuge one night in an old building. They find the walls wallpapered with newspapers articles from the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper. Hannie is shocked to learn the articles were written by former slaves looking for lost kin.
[Hear the plaintive song “Lorena” on 
Her Last Flight captures the spitfire spirit of the early aviatrixes like Amelia Earhart, Ruth Nichols and Louise Thadon. Although there are strong inferences to Amelia Earhart, this is not a fictional accounting of her life. References to lead character, Irene Foster’s interest in surfing is likely modeled after surfers like Isabel Lethan.
Reading the dusty journal, Everett is startled to find a clue about Sam Mallory’s most famous aviation student, Irene Foster, who also disappeared in flight. Foster and Mallory, in 1928, were the most famous aviators with a history of flying together on long distance rallies. By 1937, Irene Foster was flying solo. On a flight circumnavigating the globe, she failed to arrive at a planned stop to meet up with her husband, George Morrow. Extensive searches concluded she was lost at sea. Yet, Sam’s last journal entry from 1937 was a scrawled message – GM to rescue at last thank God She will live. Could Irene Foster have left her husband and traveled to Spain to be with Sam? Was she with Sam when his plane crashed? Is she alive?
Hanalei, Hawai’i October 1947
Ana, the daughter of the chief scribe to Herod expresses her longings to be remembered throughout time in this pseudo-diary account of her life. She wants the world to know what life was like for a woman in the time of Herod and Pontius Pilate – and what life would look like if you buck the system.
When Ana is fourteen-years-old, she begins her menses, and is quickly betrothed by her father to an old beetle-eyed and cruel landowner. Ana’s introduction to her betrothed is a public spectacle in the heart of the marketplace intended to highlight the high status of both families. Her reaction upon meeting her intended was to faint dead-away. She is rescued from her fall by a young bearded man who visage brings on “odd smelting” in her thighs.
For Ana, moving to Jesus’s family compound filled with siblings and their spouses is a shock. She has to partake in harsh physical tasks that she assumes to the best of her ability. In time, their marriage is strained as Jesus begins to realize that he has a mission from God that he must fulfill and begins to spend massive amounts of time away from Ana. The day arrives that Jesus tells Ana that he must go on alone to discover what he must do to fulfill his predestined future.
Ana never gives up on Jesus. Her life, after he leaves her, is one tragic day after another. With the help of other enlightened people, she is provided the means to document her story returning to her own passion as a scribe. Through Ana we follow the final days of Jesus concluding with his death. We feel her agony as she witnesses his final steps burdened with the weight of the cross. We cry with her as she stands at the foot of the cross.
She wonders if soon there will be no one left at all.
Outside Mitchell Inn, high up a remote mountain road in the N.Y. Catskills, the blizzard is intensifying. Snow pelts the windows like bullets and the wind howls angrily. Inside, the fireplace crackles and snaps throwing welcoming heat around the lobby. The weekend is about to begin and the mystery awaits.
Edgar Hill is a self-centered egotist overweight slob uninterested in exercise and more interested in a cold brew. He prefers time away from his family and the drudgery of home life with squawking children and the admonitions of his exhausted wife. He loves his family; just doesn’t see the point in investing his time with them. He doesn’t seem to find the point of anything, actually.
The high fives were short lived as a rapid-onset virus began spreading through the country. The U.S. powers-that-be turned to the scientists that created the NANs for help. Their nano-tech scientists, having reported that the NANs had not been fully vetted for use, had been kept in the dark about the deployment. Suddenly it was a deadly race to determine if the NANs could be stopped before it turned into a pandemic. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Maurice Swift has always wanted to be a writer. And not just any writer. The best of the best. Someone that history will remember as a literary great and whose books will never go out of print. But he has one problem. He can put together the words on paper but he is incapable of generating the original idea; he lacks imagination.
The second part of the book, to me, was the most interesting. Maurice Swift, accompanying his latest victim, American author, Dash Hardy, unexpectedly met the renowned Gore Vidal at his home in Italian villa, The Swallow’s Nest. This serendipitous encounter exposed Swift’s wiles as he tried to vandalism Vidal’s life and ingratiate himself into his social community; if successful there would be no need to squander his unproductive time with Dash. The world-wise Vidal recognized Maurice’s tactics. The acerbic literary elder sparred with Swift and privately let him know that wasn’t blind to the young man’s game; he couldn’t out-master the master.
If you are an adventuresome young woman of high moral character and fine health, are you willing to travel to California in search of a good husband? Do you want to instill God and Civilization and Righteousness in the westernmost part of our country?
Being an adventuresome old woman, not necessarily of high moral character, I decided to spent the day traveling with forty-three woman in a train of prairie schooners heading from St. Joe, Missouri to California. The book amused me but I won’t say it made me feel like I connected with the characters. As a woman born at a time when my father had to sign for my first credit card, I could relate to many of the misogynistic scenes; there were times I could see where the use of a good war club might serve as an attitude adjuster.
When he was around seven-years-old, the United States was attacked and retaliated against Afghanistan for harboring Osama Bin Laden. At the time of the invasion, his Uncle Lala, was a high ranking Taliban secret officer. The Passarlay family’s earlier association with the mujahideen during the recent war with Russian brought the Americans to Gulwalhi’s home suspecting stored weapons. Tragically, the American raid left his father and grandfather dead.
The boys were sad to leave but somewhat excited about the journey. The promised two week journey began with deception. The boys were immediately separated. Gulwahli found himself among streams of constantly changing refugees, mostly older adult men, some who shielded and protected him as best they could under the circumstances.
The actual journey took the heartbroken and terrified Gulwalhi a harrowing year through nine different countries. He suffered torture and imprisonment three times in adult prisons – Iraq, Bulgaria, and Turkey, and with the wiles of the innocent and dumb luck, escaped three times. He, incredibly, survived each leg of the journey, barely, suffering physically from starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, heat exhaustion, and a myriad of unimaginable conditions laced with beatings, mental cruelty, and constant threat of danger. The refugees seen only a paycheck and viewed as chattel – subhuman.
The world has changed- and not for the better. More and more people struggle to stay alive, chancing death every day to live in safety. He wants to the world to open their hearts and minds to see that most, certainly not all, refugees are looking for a hand-up not a handout. He realizes the pressures placed on countries where refugees are flocking to for help are struggling to handle the influx. He just wants the refugees to seen human and treated humanely while in transition.
Secrets are like pods of the milkweed. They always burst open… Red Sky in the Morning
The old rocking chair faced east looking down the Qu’ Appelle valley in Saskatchewan, Canada. God knows where its journey began, but when the Cree Indian woman found it abandoned in the plains grass, she knew it was special and dragged it back to her tipi. Her young daughter, Red Sky in the Morning, was the only one that heard the chair’s past in the creaking wood.
Back in 2016, while researching book titles that might be of interest for a local book club, I stumbled across – Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons From a Small-Town Obituary Writer. Intrigued, I bought a copy of the tiny book and placed it on my TBR shelf. The reading club, limited to 8 titles a year, didn’t select the book. Time marched on and I forgot about it.
As suggested by the subtitle, obituaries and/or “life stories” play an important part of each of the 18 brief essays. It was easy reading that was tinged with humor, compassion and uplifting stories about newly departed neighbors and friends in the author’s hometown of tiny Haines, Alaska. Finding the Good is just that – interviewing those that knew the departed and finding the good in their life story yet not ignoring their less glamorous moments. The point of each story was crafting an obituary that showed their humanness and reflected the fact that their lives mattered to others.
Embedded in one story is the following quote that seems to sum up the book’s message.
People don’t gather after a death to mourn, but rather to reaffirm why life matters and to remember to exult in the only one we’ll ever have. We hold funerals, memorials, celebrations – whatever you want to call them – to seek and to find the heart of the matter of this trip we all Life.
Jojo Moyes, known for her numerous heartwarming romance novels, several made into movies (Me Before You) has written her first historical fiction featuring the Pack Horse Library project. Fans of her romance fiction will not be disappointed.
An old Mainer friend once told me that Moxie was the greatest beverage in the world (and actually gave me a bottle to try.) I rank it right up there with cough syrup and kerosene. “Acquired taste,” he said. But I digress.
THE SECRETS WE KEPT: a novel
When the men in black came, my daughter offered them tea. The men accepted… when they began emptying my desk drawers onto the floor… Ira… put the teacups back in the cupboard… One of the men… said, “it is time to go.”
Their love/hate story is based on fact. Loving an already married man and living in a repressed country was costly to Olga in so many ways. She was used by the Kremlin to weaken Pasternak’s resolve to finish his decades long work on Doctor Zhivago. The Soviet strategy was to learn the subject of the novel by leaning on Olga Ivinskaya. After weeks of harsh interrogation and failing to learn the substance of the novel from Olga, sentenced her to five years of hard labor at a Siberian gulag. 
Pasternak found that leading a duplicitous life, Olga’s years of incarceration, and the torture and deaths of friends and fellow colleagues of Pasternak, exacerbated his heart problems. He retreated with his wife, Zinaida, to the comfort of his remote dacha to finish his book. Upon Olga’s release from the Gulag, he bought her a small home nearby. (The Doctor Zhivago movie depicting these days at the snowy fictional dacha, Varinkino.)
Meanwhile, over in America, former members of the WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) regrouped and became the Central Intelligence Agency. Women who had served their country during the war in OSS clandestine activities, with some exceptions, found themselves reassigned to a typing pool. Fact. The characters in the typing pool are fiction. They were depicted as a giddy bunch consumed with marriage, the latest fashions and lunch dates. Cloistered within their ranks were women who were typists by day and secret “carriers” of sensitive material by night.
The blue Oldsmobile station wagon rumbled up the pea gravel driveway parking in front of an aging architectural matron, known locally, as “The Dutch House”. The wealthy previous owners, now long dead, remain omnipresent leering down in life-size portraits over the delft blue mantel; their Dutch heritage visible in every room – everything left just as it was the day they died – hairbrushes to bath towels.
Mandl decided a stunning young wife accompanying him to lavish political dinners would be an advantage. He possessively pursued her. Her parents, sensing the danger of displeasing this distasteful older suitor, advised her to marry him – ending her career as an actress. If rumors were true about the dangers for Jews in Europe, he might prove her family’s savior. Or so they thought.
As Nazi troops gathered on Austria’s border, Hedy knew it was time to play her greatest performance. Using her contacts in the entertainment industry, she disguised herself and escaped her husband and the Nazis by emigrating to the United States – taking with her Nazi secrets. Unsure what to do with this knowledge.
In October, 1937, Hedy Kiesler Mandl stepped off a train in Hollywood as Hedy Lamarr. Once more, relying on her well-honed skills as an actress, she enchants Louis B. Mayer from MGM Studios. She quickly becomes an internationally loved movie star. And once again, she finds herself controlled by men.
A chance meeting with the avant-garde composer and pianist, George Antheil, led to Hedy making a friend who could look beyond the pretty face. Hedy, having spent hours in her husband’s personal library had amassed specific knowledge of torpedoes technology. Still struggling with what to do with her knowledge of the weaknesses in Nazi weaponry, she enlists Antheil’s help in creating technology that would improve the American Navy’s accuracy in torpedo accuracy.
The setting and circumstances of Konzentrationslager (KL) Auschwitzcan play a harsh backdrop. The cruelty hard to read.
Where to begin. Perhaps with the truth. Some people are going to love the sneaky slow twisty evil of this psychological novel set in England.
THREE PINES, Quebec
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force located in Montreal, taps the infamous Chief Inspector to investigate the death or identity the death as a hunting accident. He heads out of Montreal, crossing the Champlain Bridge, heading into the Eastern Townships. The scenery changes from congested urban environment transitioning to pastoral greenery and suburban villages. Suddenly, off to the side, is a pockmarked metal sign pointing down a rough-and-tumble dirt road. The road dead ends revealing a charming magical scene – a “Thomas Kinkade” village that exudes peace and calm. A most unlikely setting for a violent murder. A place one resident told Gamache she doesn’t remember a crime of any kind during the twenty-five years she has lived there.
The Passengers by John Marrs, set in the “not-too-distant” future, is fiction. The nomenclature has changed – there are no longer drivers, they have become passengers. Fasten your seat-belts. This thriller will have you spinning pages.
Dear Reader, If you have time, please read Still Waters, before diving into this second marvelous novel, The Bridge Between! Pull up a beach chair, a cold drink, feel the breeze, smell the pluff mud and listen to the rolling waves. It isn’t necessary that you do so, but the family you will fall in love with in Still Waters continues in this newest work. Having read both books, I feel I know the characters so well that I am surprised they are not neighbors of mine.
Thirty years later, having obtained an MFA from NYU, he has crafted his debut novel weaving the reference to JFK, Jr. and suicide into the story. The novel’s setting is familiar to him as well; home life in the low-income public housing projects of Chelsea in New York City. A generational workplace as doormen at a posh Fifth Avenue apartment building. The sad history of a few ancestors, parking themselves in pubs, attempting to drown life’s sorrows and inequities.
From all these loose threads, he crafted, the one, the only, Cornelius Sky.
One of the conflicts doctors face in wartime is that they are often asked to do something that is against their healing instincts, because curing a soldier and returning him to the front may mean sending him to his death. This complicates our oath to ‘do no harm.’ I wanted to examine a doctor faced by such choices. 
Winter Soldier is a riveting story of a medical student and a mysterious nun, Margarete, thrown together in a makeshift hospital in an abandoned church in the Austro-Hungarian region of World War I. With a pew for a surgical table and forays to the woods for sustenance, they compassionately offer care to the limbless and horrifically disfigured soldiers in their care. In time, it became a love story. In time, it became a fight for individual choice vs. a doctor’s need to pursue medical care beyond the scope of his duties.
Twenty-two year old, Lucius Krzelewski, was born to a wealthy Polish aristocratic family living in Vienna. His father, an ardent patriot, spent his days reliving the glory days of the fierce soldiers known as the Polish Winged Hussars. He did his best efforts to instill that military fervor in his youngest son, but Lucius showed no aptitude or interest in becoming a soldier.
“Oh,” she said coming to a stop; startled.
The setting. Golden Cove. A fictional town tucked in the bush on the West Coast of South Island, NZ. “[A] primal and untamed landscape [with] trees born of ancient seeds and the ferns huge and green”; each fighting for dominance before reaching the jagged cliffs over looking the Tasman Sea and gorgeous beaches. A wild place where tragedy happened in the past when three visiting hikers disappeared into the bush without a trace over the summer. Present day, life has calmed and the disappearances of those three girls only a sad memory dragged out now and then.
The town is shaken to its roots. Is she injured? Or . . . reviving old memories of the missing girls. Has something evil invaded their isolated world again? From within the community or outside?
Mr. Arcilla died. . . Handsome and scruffy and achingly tall. . .He was just out of college. . . to teach twelve-year-old boarding school girls the fundamentals of Spanish and French. . . Spanish then French. . . He never made it to French. . . 
He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a tree house in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again.
Christopher begins to hear voices and messages that he can’t decipher. One day he drawn into the densely forested and foreboding Mission Street Woods. Despite a town wide manhunt, no sign of Christopher is found. Mysteriously, six days later, Christopher reappears and it is immediately obvious that something happened in those woods to change him. And the reader begins to note that the atmosphere in town is growing creepy and scary.
The story is hard-charging at this point and nearly impossible to put down. Supernatural creatures, seen only by Christopher, float through town screaming and battling one another. The deer in the forest seem possessed and appear in the weirdest moments; almost like stalkers. Christopher is aware that he can read minds and that his touch has a chilling affect on anyone he lays a hand upon.
I have now lived geographically in the heart of the Bible Belt for thirty-three years. I was permanently transplanted here quite by accident from northern New York State. The very first question I was asked by the very first person I met was, “Are you saved?” It was news to me that I was in danger and my immediate reply was – From What?
My book club selected Boy Erased for last month’s discussion. As I read the book and smashed into the inner struggles of Garrard Conley’s life, I felt like I was dropped from 35,000 feet into Dante’s inferno.
At age 19, Garrard broke tradition within his family and left for a secular education at a “liberal” college. Although his parents were concerned that his relationship with God would be affected by exposure to secular education, they paid his tuition.
Publisher’s Synopsis
Jane loses everything when her teenage daughter is killed in a senseless accident. Jane is devastated, but sometime later, she makes one tiny stab at a new life: she moves from San Francisco to the tiny seaside town of Half Moon Bay.
I would have given the book a one star rating but for the intriguing descriptions of the floral plants featured in the nursery where Jane worked. I found myself turning to my collection of botanical books parked on the side table of more interest than Jane’s psychological and emotional issues. The plant intrigue earned a second star for the book.
Hoping for a new start, she escapes to a small seaside town. It turns out that her issues come with her; the only change is geography. The loss of her daughter consumes her thoughts. She gets along well with everyone in town on a surface level but internally she is a lonely mess.
When Jane meets Alma, Edward’s significant other, she worries that Alma would find out about her relationship with Edward. Surprisingly, Alma already knows and doesn’t give a flip. The couple smothers Jane with over-the-top affection and frequent invitations to their home. Their seduction routine leads to daredevil deeds that require Jane to endanger her life and to commit large scale vandalism.
My honest opinion? The book is disjointed and ricochets around in Jane’s mind. The various plot lines don’t seem to build suspense and feels like life in a wind tunnel. I think it could have been a good book with more judicious editing and deeper character development. As it is now, the characters are flat, the plot and conclusion obvious, and the story feels like a blindfolded foot race through a corn maze.
The hundreds of girls moved en-masse for protection and stood weeping at the foot of the [tamarind] tree . . . Do you know why you are here? . . . It is in your best interests to choose our religion . . . Even if you refuse to accept our religion, you must wear the hijab.
The marauders endeavor to eliminate any Western influences and to force native peoples to their extreme Islamic views. The most notable of the violent Islamic terror groups is known as Boko Haram; whose name loosely means “Western education is a sin.”
Nearly two years to the day from their capture and in the heart of the divisive United States 2016 election season, Boko Haram revived attention to their insidious kidnapping by releasing 21 girls. Once again, and for a brief time only, the world renewed its interest in the fate of these innocents.
There is always a certain level of risk involved in negotiations with wild places and wild elements. Even those places that seem tame, or familiar. . . The key is finding a balance – trying to determine whether the risk is worth the reward. Caroline Van Hemert
The Story of Arthur Truluv is a tender story of love, loss, friendship, and acceptance. Arthur Moses, an elderly widower, mourns the loss of his wife, Nola and spends each day eating lunch at her grave-site. Tucked away from view in the same graveyard sits a young troubled teen, Maddy, spending her lonely lunch hours observing Arthur and his one-sided conversations with Nola. In time, they meet and form an enduring friendship. Lucille Howard, Arthur’s crotchety yet kind-hearted next door neighbor and friend, suffers the loss of her childhood true love, Frank, shortly after they are reunited in old age. Arthur’s kind heart draws the sorrowful and depressed Lucille into the circle of love he shares with Maddy. The trio becomes an unconventional family. Arthur, with one leg in the afterlife and the other seeded to the living world is the heart and soul of the book. Maddy, not without flaws, finds Arthur to be more than a surrogate grandfather. When she stumbles, she finds him to be a loyal and accepting friend. She calls him Truluv. Lucille finds a new purpose in life guided by Arthur and his eternal optimism and kindness. The ending is as it should be; Arthur gracefully slips into the next world and joins his beloved Nola.
Night of Miracles feels like a trip back to the old neighborhood. Life has moved things along. Maddy inherited Arthur’s house. When she and her daughter, Nola, (named for Arthur’s wife) left town to attend college, Lucille holds down the fort and continues to host her infamous baking classes to an ever growing number of students.
Stephanie Land’s New York Times’ bestseller, Maid threw a flash-bang grenade into my mind unearthing memories from forty years ago. My husband and I were on a military move with everything in storage and traveling across country from California to eventually, Berlin, Germany. One morning my husband left to get the car washed. I never saw him again for eleven years. He disappeared with the location of our household items, financial records, military ID cards, checkbook and my personal identification. I tell you all this because my own experience colored my view of the book.
“Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land’s memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America.”
While Stephanie came to grips with her new situation she took advantage of many public assistance programs. She found that complying with their restrictions and conditions was extremely time consuming. The supplemental income came with a price. When you live paycheck to paycheck at a minimum wage job, she explains, risking your job security by taking time off and losing a day’s pay just to stand in line for hours is a big deal.
She describes the judgmental looks and outright verbal taunts she receives using her assistance cards when shopping. “Get a job.” “You can thank me.” After a while, she felt everyone was judging her; whether they were or not. Some of her negative experiences might have come from her choices of food items. Her preference to use only organic foods was certainly her right but having walked down poverty lane, I believe that she could have had more bang for her buck with lower cost healthy items.
I met Ona Judge Staines in the archives. . . I was conducting research. . . about nineteenth-century black women in Philadelphia and I came across an advertisement about a runaway slave. . . called “Oney Judge”. She had escaped from the President’s House. . . How could it be that I never heard of this woman. (Erica Armstrong Dunbar)
George Washington was reputed to be a “kinder” slave owner which meant he fed and provided for his slaves somewhat better than others. His hot-temper has been sanitized in history and ask the slaves that were housed in the smoke house in the new capital if they had five-star accommodations.
She learned the truth about her place in their lives when the national capital moved to Philadelphia. Pennsylvania law “required emancipation of all adult slaves who were brought into the commonwealth for more than a period of six months.” The President, financially strapped back on the plantation feared the lost property value of freed slaves. To protect his investments, Washington devised a shifty system of uprooting his Philadelphia slaves and rotating back to Mount Vernon before the six months deadline.
Shortly before her death February 25, 1848, Ona, nearly 80 years old and still a fugitive slave of the Custis estate, gave interviews with two abolitionists newspapers. Both interviews appear in the appendix. They are believed to be a unique opportunity to view life as a slave in the Washington presidency.
John and Ella Robina have shared a wonderful life for more than fifty years. Now in their eighties, Ella suffers from cancer and has chosen to stop treatment. John has Alzheimer’s. 
Yearning for one last adventure, the self-proclaimed “down-on-their-luck geezers” kidnap themselves from the adult children and doctors who seem to run their lives to steal away from their home in suburban Detroit on a forbidden vacation of rediscovery.
John’s best friend had been warehoused in a nursing home, tethered to life support, terrified, and living the same events over and over in Groundhog Day style. After his friend’s death, John feared, he too, would follow in his friend’s footsteps. He made Ella vow that if the aperture in his own mind closed, she would not leave him staked out to die a lonely and prolonged death in a nursing home.
“While the children are only concerned for our well-being, it’s still really none of their business. Durable power of attorney doesn’t mean you get to run the whole show. . . Is this [trip] a good idea? Don’t be stupid. Of course it’s not a good idea.“
Depression era Dorothea Lange image entitled Migrant Mother. After reading Mary Coin, a book I highly recommend and 
Chapter One. Opening scene. 1964, Berkley, California. If this was a movie script, Dorothea Lange, now elderly and gravely ill, would be seen opening an envelope embossed with the image of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The contents of that letter, we later learn, informs her of their plan for a retrospective exhibit of her life’s work.
I lean over to open a drawer and retrieve [my] files. California, 1936. New Mexico, 1935. Texas, 1938. Arkansas, 1938, Arizona, 1940. Black-and-white photographs spill out…Faces of men, women, and children… They gave a face to the masses struggling to make ends meet. They started conversations… And while I don’t regret my choices, I am saddened that I’ve hurt people dear to me.
The Stock Market Crash in 1929 changed everyone’s future. Her clientele disappeared one-by-one as family portraits become a luxury few could afford. By this time, she had married her first husband, Maynard Dixon, a hot-tempered philandering landscape painter with traveling “genes”. Dorothea, the mother of two boys, found herself between a rock and a hard place. With a floundering marriage and two dependent children, she needed to find work in a world where everyone needed a job. As she struggled to find new footing, Dorothea made the heartbreaking decision to foster-out her boys to give them a stable caring home. A decision made after seeing children left to fend for themselves in the streets.
This first photo led to twenty years of documenting the lives of the downtrodden with the goal of raising the awareness of their plight to the unaffected. Some of her work proved too revealing. Her photos of the Japanese American relocation camps were confiscated by the government; a nation unwilling to expose its racism against its own citizenry.
As soon as [Chester] pulled open the outside door [of the theater] he heard a faint thrumming of wind that resembled the plucking of thick guitar strings… ‘A duster!, Maxine shouted… ‘Tall as a mountain! Oh my God! I’ve never seen one this big!’
The population of the area is a mishmash of down-on-their-luck souls. Alongside the farms and ranches is a squatters camp down near the train tracks. A Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) work camp is nearby; a collection of young men from all over the country gathered near Vermillion for a chance at a job by the government. As in any community, there are the more fortunate families who live a different anxiety – fearful of the unfortunate. It is a jittery and suspicious time for all.
Rain, at this point, is their only solution. Rain would keep the farmers and ranchers on their homesteads and bring commerce to town. Believing that desperate times do call for desperate measures, a small group of merchants cobble together the last of their savings and hire a charlatan who convinces them he knows how to make it rain.
In the dire circumstances, folks looked for whatever small pleasures could ease their pain. One popular source of relief came at the local movie theater run by the blind owner, Chester. The other is drinking away the misery at the local bar.
“What d’ya mean, where the crawdads sing? Ma used to say that”, [said Kya]… Tate said, “Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.
Being alone in the Marsh didn’t frighten Kya. She had grown used to escaping for long periods into the wilds when Pa would be on a rampage. What did bother her was why none of her siblings or Ma took her with them when they made their escape. Was she disposable? Worthless? Invisible?
The sun, warm as a blanket,
One day, a few years after she was abandoned, she unexpectedly finds a boy fishing in her marsh. Although he seems to not see her, she finds gifts of rare feathers appearing in a stump near her house. The careful contact between them leads to a comfortable friendship. The kind-hearted Tate recognizes Kya as smart and intellectually curious and teaches her to read. When Tate graduates high school he breaks Kya’s heart as he leaves for college and a life away from the coast. He vows to return but becomes ensnared in the outside world and reneges on his promise. And the lonely years begin again for Kya.
Covid-19 Matters
As I try to form my thoughts here, I am reminded of Ian Strachan’s children’s book –The Boy in the Bubble. I can’t be the only person on the globe that’s chafing at the bit to get their hair cut and a hug from my best friends. Ya, I know. I could do those things. But you see, I am of the opinion that a longer life with my family outweighs looking good for the funeral director.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I live isolated on Alec Mountain. The only people I see regularly are the mail carrier and the garbage pickup crew. About every 2-3 weeks, I mask up and head to the grocery store.
In the mornings, when the weather permits, I build a tiny fire, plop my tush in my wooden glider, sip my morning coffee, and watch the sun rise. The birds are outrageously loud this year. It makes me feel better to be outside. I look around and realize that the natural world is going on just fine in spite of the pandemic.
I have my concerns and worries just like everyone else. There are family members serving their communities in the health care field to worry about. My son lives in Germany and recently had a serious crash on his bicycle requiring surgery and I can’t go to see him. My sister is in an Atlanta area nursing home where many residents and staff have Covid and a fair number of residents have died. I am her trustee and have been handling complicated financial transactions on her behalf standing in front of drive-up bank windows; the last time in the rain.
So where am I going with all this? I have come to the conclusion that my brain has been stunned and I just can’t stop my mental wanderings long enough to write reviews for my blog. I still read. I have read some very fascinating new fiction – pickup a copy of The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate. Stay tuned, I will be back in the near future.
My wildlife camera captures guests on those trails. Some delightful and others requiring some intervention. Imagine my surprise to recently capture images of an entire herd of cows that had broken loose from their pasture and some how climbed the mountain to enjoy my trails.
Please stay safe. Things will get better.I am sure of that for a fact.
Back with you soon.
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