#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
“She reached across Kat and showed me the picture
she wore pinned to her shawl like a campaign button.
I said he was beautiful and finally began to weep
and my husband, focusing, of course, on me with
that look he has--equal parts concern and impatience—
said, “He wasn’t your child.” and I swallowed and
hating him for the obliviousness of his love for me,
and myself for self-righteousness and sentimentality,
quoted from the first grown up picture book I ever owned--
my throat constricted so I sounded like a frog--
‘All children are my children.’
~ Excerpt from “Emmie’s Wedding,” by Alice Weiss, published in Wilderness House Literary Review
Awake well before dawn; another departure, Frank has to leave before the sun is up. It begins to be light and I go out, quickly return for a jacket. A thick layer of clouds above the beach. Some days I know exactly which way I want to walk, north or south. Today, I wasn’t sure. Hesitated. Headed north. Good choice. I spend time watching the shore birds fish in the surf. Lucky, I find a feather of a roseate spoonbill. I find an ancient looking shell with a hermit crab washed ashore on the sand. I take my time this morning, it’s a long, slow walk looking and looking at all there is to see that’s new and fresh and mysterious and beautiful. Indoors, I am quite productive in the quiet. A day of some sad news. A poet from our Monday night workshop who moved away a few months after I joined, has passed away yesterday. Her writing is above. And, then I heard my sister-in-law’s mother passed away yesterday too. I’m sorry for both these losses. In the late afternoon, after I write and send my newsletter, and after I have worked quite a bit on revising my breastfeeding poem, I drive to Bookstore 1, an independent bookstore in Sarasota. I have finished the fascinating book my daughter gave me for my birthday months ago that I started when I arrived here: The Feather Thief, by Kirk Wallace Johnson (I give it 5 stars.). The minute I walk in the door of Bookstore 1, I easily see the three books I came looking for: The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett; Olive, Again, by Elizabeth Strout; and The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979, edited by Saskia Hamilton. Now I wonder if I will sleep at all tonight, or read and read and read. The problem will be like the one I had this morning deciding which way to walk. I will have to somehow figure out which one to read first.
