Good Read

When’s the last time you wept over a good book? I’m talking literal tears running down your cheeks and the need for multiple tissues.

I found myself in this situation a few days ago, and it all started with a gorgeous ice-crusted morning.

I’ve made it a goal this year to pay closer attention to my surroundings. Various forces having served to contract the sphere of my life’s influence year by year into a smaller and smaller circle–COVID pandemic, I’m looking at you too–I’ve given up resisting the squeeze and thrown my energies into the narrowest circle of all. Home.

I think I read somewhere once that one could spend a lifetime discovering all there is to discover in a single cubic inch of soil* (*reference needed). If that’s true, then certainly there’s more than enough for me to observe in the multiple acres I find myself situated on.

(I promise, I will come back around to the book.)

So each day, camera in hand, I head out to see what I can see.

There was a morning earlier this week that was absolutely brilliant. Rain the previous evening had turned to ice, covering every blade of grass, each knobby seedhead, all the various briars and branches everywhere in a slick, sparkling coat.

Individual needles of pine trees sported their own sets of ice jewels, and it was in observing a radiant grove of evergreens that my mind was transported to Terabithia.

That afternoon I sat down with Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia” and blithely dove in. I know this story. I’ve read it more than once, so I was not surprised in any way by the tragic ending. Yet, it struck me with a powerful force. I read a chapter here, a chapter there through the afternoon. Evening–kids tucked in their beds, quiet house–found me, with the heavy weight of my husband’s sleeping head in my lap, weeping over Jess and Leslie, once King and Queen of the magical forest kingdom of Terabithia.

I will admit, it felt good to cry like that–to let the story take me in, and give me a sucker punch right in my adult gut (I’m a bigger target now than I used to be). A well-written “kid’s book” can also be a powerful read for a grown-up.

Have you experienced that? Seeing a story you loved as a child in a new light as an adult? What’s been in your pile of “good reads” lately? I’d love to hear!

with love, Anita