Views

The view this week from the desk is of a beautiful and fragrant rose from the garden. Refreshing when my nose is buried in textbooks. My reading has slowed down a bit since the start of the school year but I’ve found that I’ve been more inspired lately to create. Knitting crocheting and baking give me quick bursts of relaxation-I do them in the between times when I don’t have hours to spend cuddled with a book.

It’s cooling off some and the garden is a nice place to be. The tomatoes are just about finished for the year but the jalapenos and bell pepper are still going. It’s amazing the amount of dishes I can prepare that include jalapeno. They give such a wonderful flavor even in pasta sauce. We’ve planted cabbage and collard greens which I’m very excited for. We had to pull up our onion as they never came up. The verdict is that I’m to blame for planting them too deep.

Here in photos are all the non-bookish things that are getting me through the semester.

A Grey Delivery

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This month A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 arrived from Persephone Books. This is book number 2 in a twelve month subscription. Written by Ruth Adams in 1975 Persephone’s website describes it as “the most readable overview of twentieth century women’s lives yet written, covering everything Persephone readers might want to know about the suffragettes, early ‘type-writers’, contraception or work in wartime; and it complements our other books by exploring factually what they, indirectly, explore in fiction.”

Last month I received Dorothy Whipple’s They Were Sisters.

Does Your House Have Lions?

Sonia Sanchez’ poem tells the story of a family touched by AIDS. A brother, a son struggles with desertion by his father, struggles to make a life and turns to the city.

and a new geography greeted him.
the atlantic drifted from offshore
to lick his wounds to give him slim
transfusion as he turned changed wore
a new waistcoat of solicitor
antidote to his southern skin
ammunition for a young paladin

This is a story of relationships lost and renewed, of family of this world and beyond. We follow the family’s confrontation with loss and their attempt to heal.

how to erect respect in a country of men
where dollars pump their veins?
how to return from exile from swollen
tongues crisscrossing my frail domain?
how to learn to love me amid all the pain?
how to look into his eyes an be reborn
without blood and phlegm and thorn?

The poem is told in the voices of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestor. We see that no one and nothing operates in isolation and that no matter what things can be righted again.