My eldest brother has been gone a year and a half; our mother, ten years; our father, twenty-eight; our father’s mother and father, thirty-three; our mother’s father, sixty-nine; her mother, forty-two.
Friends, family friends, relatives, loyal canine companions — the list is long.
Teachers, schoolmates, barbers, insurance men, mechanics, storekeepers, fruit packers, janitors, farm help; doctors, dentists, accountants, farmers from the old neighborhood; grocery checkers, retired men in overalls, librarians, old-timers playing dominoes in the park.
None of this is sad, only beautiful, as a fabric is beautiful, a tapestry, a mosaic, or a homemade pie crust.
We bought more apples at the farm this morning. Some were varieties new to us, and we’ve both already forgotten the names. When I was selecting them from their respective piles, I did choose one very large Summerset; I remember now that after our last trip, I wrote Somerset — an egregious error, although, once upon a time, egregious meant outstanding in a good way. There — I just corrected it. It’s on the page titled “A Raft of Lemons” — a visual title if there ever was one, and which would serve for a story that might include shipwreck.
Read the thirty-eighth chapter of Middlemarch.
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Aye, certainty is murder. Love is easy when you’re not so sure.
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Book-lovers hold hands differently; they read each other’s fingers a page at a time.
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September 29, 2023.
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[ 1882 ]
Categories: If It Had A Name
Tags: Apples, Beauty, Books, Certainty, Death, Family History, Fingers, Friends, George Eliot, Journals, Kirk, Lemons, Love, Memory, Middlemarch, My Father, My Grandfather, My Grandmother, My Mother, My Mother's Father, My Mother's Mother, Pages, Pie Crust, Reading, Sadness
William Michaelian 