Years ago, when the dad of one of Henry’s classmates was dying of cancer, I made this cake every day for nearly a month.  Richard and I had become close during his illness, and I usually spent part of each afternoon, before school pick-up, at his house.  He and his wife had decided that his would not be a lonely death, but rather a carefully, lovingly populated one.  They wanted company.  They wanted their home to be filled with life and laughter and the sound of children’s voices even as the end one young father’s life drew near.

It was an education for me to be a part of that thoughtfully orchestrated leave-taking, an honor to be invited in, and an indelible memory that returns each spring as the daffodils bloom in my garden.  One day that early May, struck by the disconnect between the explosion of life and color in the world and the slow leaching of life from my friend’s body, I cut every single daffodil in my yard, well over a hundred in all, and arranged them in jars in his room.

It seemed right, somehow, to take everything of beauty I could put my hands on and deliver vessels stuffed full of springtime into this household.  Everyone had some version of the same impulse it seemed — to meet death with life, grief with love. Other friends brought music, artwork, foot rubs, poems to read out loud.  The kitchen was always full of people, the tea kettle always on boil, the refrigerator always full of good food.

But as Richard’s appetite waned, there was just one thing he wanted to eat, just one treat that actually tasted good, even if he could manage only a bite or two: a sip of coffee and a small slice of my lemon cake.  I couldn’t do anything about the relentless progression of his illness, but I could make cake.  And so I did, again and again and again. Even now, thirteen years later, I never begin the process of grating lemon peel without thinking of Richard.

Yesterday, the daffodils were blooming at last in my New Hampshire garden.  The forsythia buds were opening before my eyes, the grass greening by the hour. And I found myself feeling  just a touch blue as I considered the fact that after many months of sharing readings and appearances with my friend Margaret Roach, author of The Backyard Parables, we were facing our final “duet” together.

We weren’t sure how many people would be willing to leave their back yards on such a glorious spring Sunday afternoon to go listen to a couple of authors talk and read.  But for the two of us it was a bittersweet moment, the end of the road for this book publication journey we’ve shared since our memoirs came out within a week of each other in January.   I wanted to mark the occasion, to offer her a sweet something by way of saying “Thank you for being my friend and partner.”  (What we’ve both learned is that book tours are lots more fun with a buddy!)

There was really just one thing to do:  make my lemon cake.  As it turned out, about forty-five people came to the bookstore and yet I’m pretty sure everyone who wanted a sliver got one.  We talked together about friendships and endings and the fact that nothing lasts.  And we shared stories and celebrated spring and acknowledged the beauty of beginnings.  For those of you who couldn’t be with us, I’m sharing the recipe.

Glazed Lemon Cake

(Simple.  Dense. Lemony. Sturdy.  Good.)

2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature

2 cups sugar (I use half a cup less)

3 eggs slightly beaten

3 cups flour

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1 cup buttermilk

2 heaping tsp. grated lemon rind

3 tblsp. fresh squeezed lemon juice

Set your oven to 325.  Grease a ten-inch tube pan, line the bottom with piece of waxed paper cut to fit exactly, grease the paper, and then lightly flour the pan.  Set aside.  In the bowl of an electric mixer cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add eggs one tablespoonful at a time, beating well after each addition.  Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt, and add to to dry ingredients with mixer on its lowest speed, alternating with the buttermilk and beginning and ending with the flour.  Beat in lemon rind and juice.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake on middle rack of oven for 65 minutes, until the cake begins to pull away from sides of pan. Cool for 10 minutes, then remove from pan and glaze (optional) while still warm.

For the glaze:  In a mixer cream together 2 cups confectioners sugar and 3 T. butter.  Add 3 heaping T. grated lemon rind and 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice.

 

 Magical Journey — my last three readings (for a while, anyway)

I would love to see you at one of these events! And if you can’t make it, please put the word out to friends in Nashville and Minneapolis.  

Thursday, May 2, 6:30 pm:  Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN  

Saturday, May 4, 7 pm:  Seventh Annual Motherhood & Words Reading, The Loft, Minneapolis, MN. 

Monday, May 6, 7 pm:  Common Good Bookstore, St. Paul, MN.

To stay up-to-date on future book news, the latest posts, and other doings, “Like” my Facebook page by clicking here. 

And to order signed/personalized copies of any of my books, click here. 

 

On the bed where I sit cross-legged, leaning against the headboard: eyeglasses, a couple of paperbacks, a new but already much loved hardcover novel, half-read, its pages folded over, the margins scattered with lightly penciled exclamations, each one a silent, emphatic yes. Two pens, gray and black, a notebook with a dark brown cover and magnetic clasp. A pile of down pillows pushed aside, the familiar quilt, softened by age and use, sun-faded. The folded comforter.

Beyond the tall triptych of windows, the view that is the backdrop of all my days and nights. Sloping fields still patched with snow, the stone walls that define our edges here, meandering tendrils of wood smoke curling skyward, the final exhalations of a slow-burning brush pile. The maple tree that’s almost close enough to touch, its dark limbs silhouetted against a twilight sky: rose, transparent blue, violet and gold. The fading palette of an April dusk. Tiny, tight-fisted buds where just yesterday there were none.

A platoon of robins that descends as if summoned to the yard. They work away at the newly bared patches of earth, eyes cocked like surveyors taking measure of the land. The mushy, receding snow. The flat, matted grass. A lone yellow crocus still clenched shut, withholding its bloom. The distant mountains drenched for one singular instant in the day’s last light, already slipping into shadow as the sky drains of color. The ticking clock on the bedside table. The quiet way evening settles in.

One son on his way tonight to New York City — hopeful, off to answer a call, a long-shot opportunity to take one small step closer to his Broadway dream. The odds aren’t good. He knows that but goes anyway. This is what it is be twenty-three and wishing for something, anything, to happen — you say yes and figure out the details later. The brief heart-tug when he left an hour ago, fresh shaven, clothes shoved into a pack, one eye on the clock, car keys jangling in his hand. Imagining him tomorrow morning at ten, climbing the stairs of some building in Times Square, giving his name at the door, slipping into a much-coveted seat at a pre-Broadway workshop where, just maybe, he can convince somebody he’d be a useful guy to have around.

From the kitchen below, the muffled sound of a Celtics game on TV. The rise and fall of my younger son’s voice and his dad’s responses, their staccato, companionable conversation punctuated by alternating cheers and cries of despair. The pleasurable stillness of the house in the hour after dinner when the dishes are done. The slow, unwinding hours before bed. The sense of embrace.

All week, I’ve been thinking about the line quoted above, Salter’s idea that “everything that is not written down disappears, except for certain imperishable moments.” By imperishable, I assume he means the big ones – the birth of a child, a phone call bringing good tidings or bad news, a vow spoken, a declaration of love, of betrayal. We don’t need to preserve those moments that instantly engrave themselves upon our hearts; for better and for worse they become part of who we are, our own unwritten enduring history.

But everyday life — the life we fumble through and take for granted and get distracted by – this ordinary life is comprised of little else but perishable moments, random strings of details, most of them barely worthy of our notice: the slant of sun across the breakfast table, the coffee steaming in the mug, the brush of a hand across a brow, the dog’s head in your lap, a son’s casual, quick embrace, a handful of stars flung across a vast night sky, few notes worked out on the piano. The flotsam and jetsam that add up to days lived, days forgotten.

It takes a kind of determined willingness to pay attention, an eye deliberately refreshed and attuned to nuance. And it takes time, time I rarely spare of late, to pause long enough to truly see. To sit in silence and slowly, haltingly, put what is fleeting and ephemeral into words. The inescapable truth of the present moment: it’s already gone by the time I manage to set it down upon a page.

And yet, I do believe there’s something to be said for trying. Something to be said for inhabiting stillness and then looking out at everything as if for the first time. For me, it is always the same lesson, one I learn by lingering in one place for a while and softening my gaze. Making myself at home in the moment means allowing time and space for each thing to become wholly itself, distinct and beautiful in its own way, each bearing its own secret revelation.

What I’m noticing as I sit in bed this evening and take stock of the fading, golden light, the muffled sounds of home, the unimportant particulars of here and now, is this: the simple act of recalibrating my attention calls me back into relationship with my life.

Perhaps a day will come when I will be grateful even for this humble record, this snapshot of an unremarkable time. I still believe with all my heart in the gift of an ordinary day. But I also have to remind myself, again and again, to accept that gift for what it is: proof that every moment offers another quiet opportunity to be amazed.

So, why not try this? Close your eyes. Draw a deep breath in and then exhale a long, deep breath out. Step gently through the opening, into now. Allow your eyes to open quietly, as if you are drawing back, a curtain. See whatever is at hand. This is where you are. Before the moment sheds its skin and assumes a new shape, weave a skein of words around it. Take a picture. Say “thank you” out loud and feel the texture of those words on your tongue. See how the very act of noticing is something akin to wonder.

A mother’s midlife memoir paired with a gardening book?

What, you might well ask, could these two volumes possibly have in common?   And why would a married mom of two and a resolutely single, encyclopedically knowledgeable, former-Martha-Stewart-publishing-executive-turned-rural-hermit ever become writing partners, let alone dear friends?

Well, if age teaches us anything, it’s that life is full of surprises – and that the relationships that bloom and blossom in the langorous afternoon of life are often quite different from those of its bright morning.  No longer bound to our friends by social stratifications, proximity, or the shared duties of parenthood, we find ourselves connected, instead, at a soul level.  “Friendship,” writes C.S. Lewis, “is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What? You too?  I thought I was the only one.’”

And so it was with Margaret Roach and me.  Coincidence brought us together (we share a publisher, and our editors had given us galleys of each other’s last books).  But it wasn’t until we met in person, at a bookseller’s convention two years ago, that we each experienced that unmistakable “click” that signals this is someone who is meant to be in my life.

Reading Margaret’s work, I knew right away I was in the presence of a kindred spirit — someone who finds pleasure in the small moments, who draws sustenance and inspiration from the frogs in her pond and the flowers at her doorstep, who is more at home stirring a pot of home-made soup at the stove than hobnobbing with fellow writers at literary soirees.

Becoming her friend for real, spending overnights in her guest cottage and sharing countless dinners together, only confirmed what I’d already suspected: different as our lives may be on the surface (Margaret never has to postpone a writing project because a son needs help on his college application; I wouldn’t know a Chaenomeles x superba if one was in full bloom in my own yard), we nevertheless have much to offer each other – gifts of time and support and perspective on the universal challenges (and joys!) of growing older and, hopefully, just a wee bit wiser.

So maybe it’s not so surprising after all, that when we exchanged manuscripts of our most recent books, we each found ourselves scribbling excited “Yes!” notes and exclamation points in the margins.  There were so many common themes that we had to laugh.  And then we realized that of course our readers would probably enjoy getting to know one another as much as the two of us had.

Since our books came out last month, Margaret and I have appeared together at bookstores all over New England – and we can now report that our hunch was right.  The conversations are lively, our joint readings fun for all, and the connections and cross-overs always surprising and delightful.

So, consider this your invitation to come join us!  Win our books (signed, personalized copies), hear us speak, or if you can’t make it to one of the events below — jump in to our free online chat starting Monday on Goodreads.

 

 Duets with Margaret

The goodreads.com event
Goodreads is like a giant online book club that never sleeps. It’s amazing, and it’s free; a great place to get tips from other keen readers on books to look out for, according to your interests, and to “talk” to authors. Margaret Roach (author most recently of “The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life”) and I will be there Monday February 25 for an open forum, to answer your questions about our new (or older) books, about writing, or about whatever you feel like asking about.

In our in-person events recently, the topics have ranged from finding midlife friendship, to raising adolescent boys (or unruly plants), to recipes we’ve swapped and books we’ve both read, to our writing “process” (Margaret paces, I sit still for hours on end)—no kidding, that wide a range, and more. Fun! So come share whatever’s on your mind. Won’t you sign up and join us?

The in-person events

• Sunday, February 24, 3 PM: POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER. Reading and conversation with author Margaret Roach from our two new books, her “The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life” and my “Magical Journey” An Apprenticeship in Contentment,” at the Concord (MA) Bookshop.
• Thursday, February 28, 7 PM: Reading and conversation with author Margaret Roach at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY, hosted by memoir-teacher and author Marion Roach Smith.
• Sunday, March 3, afternoon: Two events, same location: 2 PM, “The 365-Day Garden” slide lecture by Margaret Roach. 3 PM, a reading and conversation with me and Margaret from our two new books, at Battenkill Books, Cambridge, NY.

How to win the signed books

To enter to win a signed copy of “The Backyard Parables” and one of “Magical Journey,” too, simply comment below, answering the question:

What’s the last book you read that you recommended afterward to a friend, and why?

Then to double your chances to win—two sets are being given away on each of our websites—scurry over to Margaret’s book giveaway now and paste your comment there as well.

No answer to the question, or simply feeling shy? No worry; just say “count me in” or something to that effect, and we will. Winners will be drawn at random after entries close at midnight on Wednesday, February 27. Good luck to all.

Two days after New Years, with both sons back at school, I flew to Florida and set up camp in the guest bedroom of my parents’ house. My mom, keeping her promise not to tempt me with distractions, went about her carefree retiree’s life. Meanwhile, I holed up in my self-created bunker, sitting cross-legged on the bed for hours on end, bent over my laptop, pretending no one would ever read what I was writing. My immediate goal was not to send words out into the world, but to be quiet and disciplined and attentive enough to find out if I actually had anything to say.

Now, twelve months later, the book that finally began to take shape during those weeks is in the bookstores. The irony of the title Magical Journey, of course, is that I didn’t actually go much of anywhere, except in search of a bit of solitude and silence. Sometimes the most challenging journeys aren’t the ones that require backpacks and sturdy shoes, but rather a willingness to turn inward, to seek something deep and as yet unformed within ourselves. And sometimes, as the last two weeks have revealed to me, it is the work done in lonely isolation that ultimately forges and affirms our most essential human connections out in the world.

This morning, home again after a flurry of nonstop travel and bookstore appearances, I paged through the journal I kept last winter. Every day, I attempted to clear my mind and face my fears by writing longhand in a notebook before turning on my laptop and confronting my manuscript. A few excerpts from those arduous, uncertain days exactly a year ago:

“I am so slow. What I’ve written is probably not terrible. I’m trying to convince myself that it is at least good enough. Yet moving forward feels really hard. What is the right attitude? Maybe just to try to keep on writing without judging, to think my thoughts and feel my feelings, and get something down on the page, and then decide later whether it’s any good or not.”

And this:

“The slowness, the uncertainty. What am I learning from this process? That in my writing, first and foremost, I must put my faith in the truth. That the truth is mundane, embarrassing at times, difficult to distill clearly, yet still worth reaching for. That the only way through is through. That it doesn’t get easier. That living wholeheartedly can mean going within, rather than without. Not fun, exactly, but wholehearted nonetheless.”

And also:

“So strange to be in a time of life, a place, where Steve and Henry and Jack can all be living separate lives in different places. They are doing just fine away from me; I’m the one who feels the loss of all that used to be. All I used to be. Guess that’s what it’s been like for my own mom for years now. Perhaps I’ll get used to it. I feel alive in different ways – alive when I’m needed at the center of my family, making dinner or having a heart-to-heart with one of the boys, keeping all the balls in the air. And alive in a totally different way now, in solitude, when all the structure and to-dos fall away, and I’m left with my own thoughts, my own demons and dreams, my own inner landscape. Time slows. There is nothing to do but honor my commitment to keep at this, uncomfortable and hard as it is. But I wonder: to write from this vulnerable place, to be who I really am on the page – is this in itself some kind of path or calling? Perhaps, for now anyway, it is. And perhaps, if I can just stick it out, it will even lead to joy. Or at least lead me back out of myself, with some sense of where I’m meant to go next.”

Yesterday, my friend Dani Shapiro, wrote a thoughtful, lovely post about the difference between taking risks in life and on the page. Most of us, as she points out, will go to any length to keep our loved ones safe. Learning how to assess risk is part of growing up; making prudent calls, at the heart of every mother’s job description. And yet, says Dani, “When it comes to the writer’s life, risk is what it’s all about.”

She’s right, of course. We have to step out on that high wire again and again, even though we teeter with every step, even though we’re dogged by insecurity: “Maybe it won’t work. . . . Maybe it will suck. Maybe I’ll waste my time and precious energy on a piece of prose that will be dead on arrival.”

I don’t suppose there’s any way to avoid the inexorable loneliness of the process, the feelings of frustration and powerlessness that come at the end of a day in which the only thing you really accomplished was staying put in your chair. Still, I wish that when I was sitting alone with myself in that Florida bedroom, I could have flashed forward a year, to the joyous scene last week in a hotel room in Nashville.

Every single woman from my book group had flown in earlier in the afternoon to celebrate the launch of Magical Journey with me and to attend my reading at Ann Patchett’s beautiful bookstore, Parnassus. On that first evening, we were all gathered together, toasting our trip, our thirteen years of books and lives shared, and the publication of this new memoir of mine (despite the fact that the work of writing it had kept me from attending a single meeting last year.)

The conversation soon turned to vulnerability, and risk, and the importance of sharing our stories, even the painful ones. After all these years together, we trust one another completely, hold little back, know that we can close the door and bare our souls in safety. And yet, as my friends began to share their first reactions to my book, we found ourselves talking as well about taking risks in public and on the page. And how, perhaps, in taking some risks myself, I’ve cleared a space in which other women might be more willing to share their own stories, or at least come to feel a little less alone.

This, it seems to me, is the reason any writer undertakes the speculative work of memoir. Not so much to tell “what happened,” as to illuminate the slow, halting process by which we learn to make our peace with what is. And in that vulnerable revealing, in the stumbling, wayward truth of that story, lies something that is worth offering: not the gift of what we have accomplished but rather the gift of who we really are.

To be vulnerable on the page is indeed a risk – hang yourself out on the line, and anyone can come along and take a swing at you. Yet my own experience over these last two weeks has been the opposite. People are kind, and words build bridges. As I’ve met and talked with readers in Connecticut and Nashville and Washington, DC, and as I’ve read and responded to the letters and Facebook messages and emails from strangers, I’ve been moved deeply by the stories women have shared with me, joyful stories of change and growth, but also intimate stories of loss and hardship, suffering and grief. Stories told in confidence within this safe space, a space created by kinship and kindness and courage. Publishing a book, any book, is an act of faith – in oneself of course, but in one’s readers even more. How humbling and gratifying it is to have that faith returned a thousandfold.

I would not want to relive last January, all those days spent, as Dani says, “in the teeming, writhing darkness,” trying to beat back my own self-doubt long enough to make something lasting and sturdy out of words. But I’m glad now that I did it. What I’m learning, I think, is something one of my most admired writers, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, knew all too well.

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches,” she writes in Gift from the Sea. “If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.” This, it seems to me, is the work of the writer: finding something of value to add to the suffering. Sometimes, yes, it is isolating, to dwell in that place of risk and revelation. And yet what we find on the other side is so worth the effort: community, connection, kinship, healing. Nothing less than the road back to grace.

To all of you who are supporting the birth of this book with your heartfelt letters, your messages, your words of encouragement, your online reviews and your real live attendance at my readings, a most heartfelt thank you. I am honored to be a part of this ongoing conversation, to meet you and to share the path with you, to be reminded that none of us journeys alone, that we are all connected, that my story is your story — and vice versa.

News from the road. . .

Building an audience is the writer’s job once the book is published — and that’s what I’m up to now.  (A far cry from that writerly solitude of a year ago.)  Want to help me spread the word?

Here are three things you can do:

1. Write a brief review on Amazon.

2.  Like my page on Facebook and share posts with your friends.

3. Share the book!  (One of my favorite stories: A reader wrote to tell me she was ordering five copies for friends for Valentines Day.  No sooner had she placed her order than an Amazon rep called to ask if there had been some mistake.  “No,” she replied, “I loved this book, so I’m buying more for my friends.”  The Amazon clerk read the description and said, “It does sound good.  I’m going to buy it too!”  Talk about word of mouth!)

Also, check my Events page to see if I’m coming to a bookstore near you. I’m visiting lots of independent bookstores — we need these stores in our towns, and they need our business to survive.  (This week I’ll be in:  Concord, NH; Portsmouth, NH; Manchester, VT; and Cohasset, MA.)

If you haven’t read Priscilla Gilman’s probing interview with me, Click Here.

A nice review from the Chicago Tribune (Editor’s Choice).

Finally, a word about The View from My Window, the collection of blog posts my husband gave me for Christmas.  Your comments — all 264 of them!–stunned me.  I read each one of them with gratitude.  And then I wished I could send every single one of you a copy of the book.  Which of course made me think:  there has to be a way.  For now, all I can say is, stay tuned. (This sounds like a project to take up a bit later, after Magical Journey is well on its way.)  Meanwhile, congratulations to winners Ann Laurence and Louise Olmstead, whose names were drawn at random on my pub. date.  

She was sixty, a gentle, charming Southern housewife with dreams of finally publishing the enormously long novel she’d spent years writing — years when cancer and chemotherapy and its complications had kept her confined to her house, and the joy of creating characters she loved had kept her going.

I was twenty-five, an earnest, aspiring New York editor who was certain I’d just discovered my first prize in the slush pile.  “Cold Sassy Tree could become a classic,” I confidently predicted in my typewritten manuscript report.  “It needs some cutting, but we MUST publish it.”

Not quite ready to trust my eager enthusiasm, my boss had his wife read the manuscript.  She agreed with me.  And so it was that Olive Ann became a first-time author and, in doing so, allowed me to become a first-time editor.

In the process, we became friends. In those more leisurely, pre-internet days (this was 1983!), she typed long, chatty letters to me, full of anecdotes about her family and friends in Atlanta.  Thrilled to be engaged in an actual “literary correspondence,” I answered every one.  We spoke on the phone, too, nearly daily for months, as she revised and as I cut pages, both of us trying to whittle her 640-page novel down to a more manageable size.  (I wanted to excise what I called “the dying stories,” long, rambling, invariably funny accounts of the demises and funerals and burials of various minor characters and their relatives.  Olive Ann insisted that every Southerner appreciated a good dying story, and that my failure to do so was just evidence of my constrained Yankee heritage.  We compromised.)

Olive Ann’s book was a hit, and it did become something of a minor classic, assigned in schools all over the South, featured on Oprah long before the advent of her first book club, and made into a movie starring Faye Dunaway.  Sales were brisk. And Olive Ann was in demand everywhere.  After all those years of being confined to her sick bed, she was thrilled to be in remission, and delighted to clip on her dangly earrings, put on a sparkly scarf, and go forth to meet her fans.  “I’m a ham!” she would proudly announce to her adoring audiences. And then she would entertain them for an hour, telling wildly improbable yet, she swore, absolutely true stories in her soft Southern drawl.

I was thinking of Olive Ann this morning, as I sponged down the kitchen counter and swept the sand off the mudroom floor.  Although she died in 1990, I can summon the sound of her voice still, that musical intonation, her way of turning everything into a story you wanted to hear.

Houghton Mifflin hosted an elegant party in Atlanta on the day Cold Sassy Tree was published, and I got to fly down from our New York office for the big event.  Rosalynn Carter was there, and various other luminaries and sophisticates.  I finally met “my” author for the first time in person, and was startled by how beautiful she was.  (She admitted to being a little surprised by the looks of me, too.  “Why, I thought you would be chubby,” she said, “you have a chubby voice.”)

But what I remember most vividly was Olive Ann’s admission that night that, even though she was all dressed up and the star of her own glamorous party, with people lining up to get her to sign their books, there was still no escaping the ordinariness of her real life.

“I thought that when I became an au-u-u-thor,” she said, drawing out the word, “it would be like in a fairy tale, and I would turn into, well, a princess.  So I was kind of surprised this morning when I looked down at my feet, and realized I still had to cut my toenails!”

Indeed.  My book Magical Journey is officially published today.  I’ve been on the radio since 7 am this morning,  and will be in my car driving north to a bookstore luncheon tomorrow.  There’s a party on Saturday night, and the next day I’ll fly to Nashville, to give a reading at Ann Patchett’s bookstore.  My calendar for the next two months is full of travel and appointments and  appearances.   (Check out my EVENTS page to see if I’ll be at a bookstore near you!) Exciting, nervous-making, exhausting.  And, to me right now, all a little unreal.

So, at the moment, I’m sitting here on the couch, looking at my own toenails.  And realizing I should absolutely give them a trim.  Meanwhile, there are few other things on my plate as well:  Jack’s college essay needs another read, the dog’s butt is stinky, there’s something wrong with the printer, and the car is due for an oil change.  The kitchen floor needs vacuuming.  We are out of milk.  This is my day.  This is my life — pub day or not.  Thank goodness.  And thank you Olive Ann, where ever you are, for reminding me to keep my feet on the ground and my toenails looking nice.

 

And now, for the book news: 

MAGICAL JOURNEY is in stores today.

(Finally!) Of course, I’m eager for you to have it in your hands. In the meantime, though, here’s some early reaction — and opportunities to win your own  copy.

First:  If you haven’t seen the VIDEO, CLICK HERE.

Second: A few glorious reviews!

What could be better, than waking up on pub date to Lindsey Mead’s beautiful reflections?  

Here’s Beth Kephart’s lovely piece.

Jena Strong says her blog post is NOT a review; but no matter, I can’t imagine anything that could have pleased me more.

Am honored to have a reader and friend in the wise and wonderful Karen Maezen Miller.  She wrote here.

And a nice shout-out from Book Page.

Want to order a personalized & signed copy? My local bookstore is making it easy. CLICK HERE.

To read an excerpt, CLICK HERE.

Want to order now? CLICK HERE.

Interested in receiving a signed bookplate for a gift? (I’d be happy to send you as many as you need!) CLICK HERE. (Make sure to include your mailing address!)

Finally: GOODREADS still has a couple of copies to give away. To enter their drawing, CLICK HERE. 

This was the first review, from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:

In this intensely moving tribute to the importance of enjoying every moment of life, Kenison (The Gift of An Ordinary Day), former longtime series editor of The Best American Short Stories, tells a tale inspired by loss and confides what can be gained from it. After a dear friend dies from cancer and her two sons head off to boarding school and college, Kenison is forced to question what remains relevant in her life and how such an introspective examination might portend a change in priorities. Identifying a common and paralyzing fear (“I am so used to doubting my worthiness that the minute I decide to do something, I start convincing myself I’m not up to the job”), she turns to intensive yoga studies, where she learns that “the best antidote to anxiety about the future is to be present in the here and now,” and that finding contentment in what one is rather than what one thinks one should be is critical. Her journey will inspire tears and determination, and remind readers that anything, “done from the heart, changes the world in some small way for the better.”

 

 

As a teenager and young woman, horses had been her passion, a passion that had no place in her adult life as a busy mother and full-time partner in my father’s business. Yet as she entered middle age, I think my mother began to worry that if she didn’t climb back on a horse soon, she might not ever do it again. Her greatest joy in life would be nothing but a passing memory, relegated to her unfettered past, a time before marriage and children and working for my dad conspired to ensure that her own hopes and dreams took a back seat to everyone else’s needs.

And so, on the cusp of forty, my mom bought herself a horse and proceeded to fall hopelessly in love all over again — with her spirited three-year-old Morgan and with the smells of sawdust and grain and fresh hay and saddle soap. Of course, the horse needed a place to live. We left the modest in-town house attached to my dad’s dental office on a busy road, where my brother and I had spent most of our lives, and moved out to the country, to a remote 1765 cape with a barn, deep in the woods and surrounded by trails. A house of low ceilings and wide, sloping floorboards, steeped in silent history.

For months, most nights after his last patient, my father slipped away to work on that old sleigh, rebuilding it from a broken down skeletal form, cleaning and polishing the runners, refurbishing all the parts, upholstering a new black leather seat, priming and painting and detailing the bright red panels and the glossy black trim. He raced against the clock, working late into the night and every available weekend hour, to make sure it was finished, perfect, by Christmas morning.

Many of my childhood memories are hazy. The horses, the sleigh, even the barn itself are long gone. But I can easily recall the dazzlingly bright Christmas morning when my dad hitched up my mom’s horse, lifted her up into the seat of the sleigh he’d made for her, and took her for a ride.

What I remember, of course, is this great labor of love on my father’s part; how, in giving her this extraordinary gift from his own heart and hand, he was really saying: “I see you. I know who you are and I know what you love, and I honor that.”

This Christmas, my husband Steve gave me the equivalent of my mother’s sleigh, a gift that is so much more than the thing itself.

I knew, over these last two years, that I was writing a book; in fact, it was never out of my mind. Even when I wasn’t working on it, I was working on it. Of course, I was also living my life, taking care of my family, spending time with my friends, writing this weekly blog.

I began the blog the week before The Gift of an Ordinary Day was published, back in the fall of 2009. My publisher had told me I needed a website, and that I should write something for it. But until the day I wrote my own first blog entry, I wasn’t exactly sure what a blog was; I’d never even seen one.

Once I started writing, though, I didn’t stop. I loved taking time out of the busyness of life to sit quietly and reflect on the meaning of the living, loved gathering up my thoughts and trying to make some sense of them, searching for the story beneath the story, the one that would give depth and shape to my experience and perhaps begin to illuminate the experiences of others as well.

Even more, I loved the conversation that soon got underway here, the thoughtful comments from you, my readers, the glimpses you’ve offered into your own lives and passions and predicaments, the heartfelt support you’ve extended to me as I’ve shared mine.

And yet, I’ve never thought of these pieces as much more than parts of that ongoing conversation, temporal and fleeting, musings that are very much of the moment in which they were written.

Turns out, my husband saw things a little differently. Perhaps he understands, even better than I do, what matters to me and why. And so months ago, unbeknownst to me, he began to gather these three years worth of pieces into a book. The result is the beautiful 350-page illustrated hardcover volume I opened on Christmas morning.

He titled the book The View from My Window, and for the jacket he shot a photo of our mountains, as I see them every single morning from my spot at the kitchen sink. He chose photos, wrote captions, assembled and re-read and copy-edited three years worth of my posts. He hired a proofreader, designed the pages and the cover, and asked a printer friend in Minnesota to produce a print run of thirty elegantly bound copies.

To say I was surprised on Christmas morning to find out I’d written not one book but two, would be an understatement. Realizing that my husband had been laboring for months, in hours when I’d assumed he was working on his own stuff, to produce a book printed and published just for me, reminded me of the long-ago efforts of my dad.

At the same time, this gesture is entirely in character for my husband, who shares my passion for books and who is at heart a publisher himself. We met, after all, at work, back when he was the marketing director at Houghton Mifflin Company and I was an aspiring young editor there. Little wonder then, that all these years later, the gift from his heart was this: to lovingly collect my words and give them back to me between two covers.

I’m not sure what to do with these books. I will give them to a few close family members and friends and save a couple for my sons and their families. But I also know that without you, the readers of this blog, The View from My Window wouldn’t exist. I would have stopped writing here long ago if it weren’t for the connection and sense of community we’ve created in this place — together.

And so, with the publisher’s gracious permission, I’d like to give away two copies of this (very) limited edition to you, the readers who show up here week after week, to read and respond and share your own stories with me and with one another. (To enter to win, just leave a comment below. I will draw two names at random on January 8 — publication date for Magical Journey!)

Today, as the snow fell softly outside, I opened my new book and began to read. It seemed right somehow, that as I bid good-bye to 2012 and prepare to welcome a new book into the world just a week from now, I pause to look backward as well as forward. Here, then, are a few of my posts from the past. Perhaps you will remember them. If you’re new to this space, perhaps you will be happy to read them for the first time.

Blessings to you and yours for a joyful new year. May you be happy. May you be well. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.

“Adulthood for Amateurs,” Oct. 26,2009

“Good-byes,” Jan. 3, 2010

“Asking for Help,” Feb. 4, 2010

“You Have What I Want,” Jan. 7, 2011

Margaret, I knew, was holed up in her own snug little house three hours from mine, working on her garden memoir, “The Backyard Parables.” Most mornings, before settling down to serious work, we would send each other a Skype greeting.

“You ok up there?” she’d type, usually around 6 am, the hour both of us consider the best for getting any real thinking done.

“Yes,” I’d type back. “Plugging away.”

“I’m here,” Margaret would answer. And somehow, just knowing that she was, brought me comfort. We were a writers’ group of two, with book deadlines just weeks apart. Whenever the going got tough, as it seemed to at some point in nearly every day, either one of us could reach out. Commiseration was never more than a click away.

We didn’t show each other our manuscripts until we had both finished writing – among other quirks we have in common is a need to work in deep privacy. But when Margaret came to the end a few weeks before I did, I felt inspired to push onward myself – I knew she was waiting for me at the finish line, eager to exchange our first drafts.

What we found, as we each began to read, was perhaps inevitable. Margaret was chronicling a year in the garden she has loved and tended for twenty-five years. And I was writing about the challenges of adjusting to a new stage of life without children at home. Yet it turned out that, unbeknownst to either of us, many of our themes were identitical: loss, change, acceptance, transformation, aging, gratitude, grace.

Some of the parallels made us laugh as we scribbled exclamation notes in the margins: Turned out we had both stood in front of our respective bathroom mirrors, tugging our middle-aged, crepey neck skin up and back, contemplating the very distant possibility of a nip or tuck to tighten things up beneath the chin.

But we also realized, as we read one another’s work, that perhaps what had seemed unique to each of us as we labored away in solitude is in fact universal: married or single, mother or childless, employed or not, rich or poor, gay or straight, each and every one of us must eventually find a way to navigate the tricky passage between youth and age.

It seems that the great challenge of our middle years is to figure out how to move into and through the second half of life with joy. Joy even in the face of inevitable loss; equanimity even in the face of relentless change; wisdom and grace even as old roles and old dreams fall away and new ones are slow to take shape. We may travel different paths through life, and yet perhaps there is no woman anywhere who doesn’t long at some point for an inner road map, some kind of guidance as we are called to release our illusions of control, to let go of who we once were and to embrace who we have become.

Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me at all that my friend and I have both spent the last couple of years quietly grappling with these very challenges – for aren’t these also the topics of conversation whenever women come together and summon the courage to drop our public faces and share our true struggles and stories?

As it turned out, our publisher decided to bring our books out within a week of each other. And suddenly, it seemed that my sustaining vision – the two of us together, holding finished books in our hands – might actually become a reality. In October, at the New England Independent Booksellers’ Association meeting, we tried our idea out on some booksellers.

“You can have us separately if you want,” we said. “But we’d also be happy to come to your store together.” By the end of the weekend, we had a whole list of bookstores that liked the idea of our “duet.” And so it was that last week, the two of us sat side by side on a couple of stools at Margaret’s house and read aloud for the first time, to a room full of invited guests – our dress rehearsal, so to speak, to make sure the program we’ve been imagining all these months would actually work.

Wine was poured, dinner was eaten, and the conversation flowed. Our test audience was kind and enthusiastic, and the passages we chose to read seemed to speak to one another in two-part harmony – two friends, two lives, two voices, two books, with much in common and much to share. By the end of the evening, a room full of women who had arrived as strangers to one another were all chatting like old friends. I looked around and took a moment simply to allow myself to be grateful: for cameraderie and home made cookies, and also for the deep, spontaneous connections that the written word, when shared aloud, can always inspire.

“That was pretty fun,” Margaret and I agreed the next day over lunch, as we ate some lentil soup I’d brought to share with her. And so, come January, we are taking this show on the road.

In the meantime, learn more about our friendship, and The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life at Margaret’s blog, A Way to Garden.

You can read excerpts from both Magical Journey and from The Backyard Parables simply by clicking on the titles.

But perhaps the best way I can introduce you to my friend is by sharing her video with you. (To watch mine, just click HERE.)

It was Margaret’s idea to share the soup recipe as well. That’s below, followed by a list of all our joint appearances this winter. Mark your calendars! We’d love to meet you.

lentil soup, adapted by katrina

ingredients

• 2 Tablespoons olive oil
• 1 red onion, chopped finely, or one large shallot chopped
• 1 leek, white part only, chopped finely
• 2 celery branches, diced finely
• 4 twigs of thyme, chopped finely
• ½ teaspoon saffron
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 3 branches of parsley or cilantro, plus more to garnish
• sea salt and pepper
• large can of diced tomatoes with their juice
• 2 tablespoons double concentrate tomato paste
• 2 cups dry French green lentils
• 2 carrots, peeled and sliced
• 2 cups peeled and diced ‘Butternut’ squash
• 4 cups water
• 2 cups white wine (or vegetable broth)
• 2 bay leaves
• 4 garlic cloves, finely minced

steps

• In large pot, heat oil, add thyme, cumin, turmeric, shallot, leek, celery, and cook, stirring, about 5 minutes, till veggies are softening.
• Add tomatoes, tomato paste, cook one minute.
• Add lentils, carrots, squash, cook one-two minutes.
• Add water, wine, bay leaves, cilantro, season w. salt and pepper, cover and simmer till lentils are tender, about 25 minutes.
• To serve: Ladle soup into deep bowls, top with a poached egg, a heaping tablespoon of creme fraiche (sour cream or yogurt can substitute), chopped cilantro or parsley leaves, and a dash of paprika.

(Recipe liberally adapted from “La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life” by Beatrice Peltre)

about our upcoming events

Margaret and I will be reading together from our two new books, “The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life” and “Magical Journey” An Apprenticeship in Contentment,” at bookstores and other venues around the Northeast this winter. Come join in our conversation–or invite us to visit your library or bookstore or book group (virtually by Skye, or in person) by emailing using this contact form.

• Saturday, January 19, 2 PM: at R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, CT.
• Saturday, January 26, afternoon: at Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, VT.
• Sunday, January 27, 3 PM: at Buttonwood Books, Cohasset, MA.
• Wednesday, January 30, 7 PM: at New England Mobile Book Fair bookshop, Newton Highlands, MA.
• Sunday, February 24, 3 PM: at the Concord (MA) Bookshop.
• Thursday, February 28, evening: at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY, hosted by memoir-teacher and author Marion Roach Smith.
• Saturday, March 2, 1-3 PM: at Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, MA.
• Sunday, March 3, 3 PM: at Battenkill Books, Cambridge, NY. (I’ll do a “365-Day Garden” lecture that same day at Battenkill, starting at 2 PM.)

My first task, on my very first day of work at Ticknor & Fields (a small, long-defunct New Haven subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Company) back in January of 1981, was to sit down with an empty scrapbook, a pair of scissors, and a jar of rubber cement. There had been some recent press about Houghton Mifflin’s resistance to a corporate buy-out. (Loyal, long-time authors like Kenneth Galbraith and Louis Auchincloss had made their voices heard, and the powers-that-be had listened. Houghton Mifflin, in 1981, was determined to remain fiercely independent. ) I was given the assignment of sorting through a huge stack of newspapers sent to us by the hired clipping service (talk about quaint!), carefully cutting out the articles, and pasting them neatly into the scrapbook. I worked on a stool in the kitchen, where it was also up to me to keep the coffee pot full and the sherry glasses washed. (Tea was served in the front room at four; sherry on Friday afternoons, or when well-known writers came to call. Calvin Trillin’s visits were occasions for cloth napkins and Chinese take-out.) I was twenty-one years old and in heaven.

In our tiny subsidiary, we all did a bit of everything, which meant, as time went on, that I often had a hand in book publicity as well as editorial work: writing press releases, putting press packets together, and then, of course, pasting all the positive newspaper reviews and feature stories into those precious scrapbooks.

It was a perfect way to familiarize myself with the names and faces in my new company, with the authors I was getting to know and the books I’d eagerly carry home to read over the weekends. Soon, I was also taking dictation and typing letters for my boss (three carbon copies of each for the files, a bottle of Wite-Out close at hand), fact –checking manuscripts in the reference room at Yale’s Sterling Library, packing up pages to be overnight mailed to authors, scribbling phone messages on little pink pads, studying the Chicago Manual of Style, and learning to wield a blue pencil as I began to proofread copy.

What amazed me the most about my thrilling (to me!) new career in publishing was the realization that every single book was really the physical manifestation of countless details, all lovingly and expertly attended to over the course of many months, and in some cases, years. It boggled my mind to watch the process unfold — from an innocuous, unread pile of typewritten pages secured with rubber bands to boxes of finished, pristine, beautiful books, ready to be stacked up on a book store’s front table.

How extraordinary it was to witness this alchemy up close, to become part of it, to understand that every single book I’d ever read had required the faith and expertise of so many different people, from the acquisition editor who said the first determined “yes,” to the copyeditor who carefully considered the placement of every semi-colon, to the production manager who inspected the glue application on the inside binding. Countless decisions to be made, and a nearly infinite number of tiny questions to be answered: fonts, margins, paper, leading, initial caps, space breaks, advertising budgets, print runs — the list went on. Names to be verified, serial commas to be made consistent, every line of every page of proof at every stage of the process to be checked, from sample pages to final pass. Every color in every jacket was examined against its Pantone original, while in the back room, our meticulous designer worked with a ruler and Exacto knife to ensure that every word of type on the front cover was perfectly placed into position – by hand.

Flash forward thirty-plus years, to my current life on the other side of the process and in a very different world. A world that can be summed up in a word: digital. What was once done laboriously and time intensively (searching for the spelling of some obscure actress’s name in an old edition of Who’s Who, for instance) can now be done in an instant, with a click of a key and a Google search. Long gone are the antique tools of the trade as it once was. Including paper.

The first manuscript I ever worked on was a first novel by a young author who appeared at the front door of our office with his 700-page mystery neatly typed and packed into three dark blue Brooks Brothers shirt boxes. A few months ago, I delivered my own manuscript to my publisher — by hitting a SEND button. Weeks later, when the copy-edited manuscript was returned to me, I opened it not as a meticulously hand-edited original typescript sent in an insured and tracked padded manila envelope, but as a Microsoft Word document. And then I set to work learning how to accept or decline the editor’s changes online, in the digital margins of my text, carrying on a virtual color-coded conversation with my copy editor, whose actual voice I will probably never hear. (Even a ringing phone is largely a thing of the past; why call and talk to a stranger, when you could text or email instead?)

As a writer with a new book coming out, I hold out little hope for print reviews; most of the small newspapers that do survive these days have long since shut down their book pages. My print run this time will be half what it was for my last book; that’s how many readers my publisher estimates have shifted to electronic devices.

And even though I have a publicist in New York who is already hard at work arranging my visits to bookstores and sending out bound galleys, the process of spreading the word about a new book has gone largely digital as well. Which means that my job as author no longer ends with writing the final lines and holding forth in a few publication-week interviews, but extends into the equally essential and ongoing industry of ensuring that, in the midst of this busy, distracted on-line world, potential readers actually know that my book exists.

For the first time, my latest book contract included a clause about social media. Maintaining a website and a Facebook presence and a Twitter account is now part of the writer’s job description. (I think I’m supposed to bone up on Pintrest and Tumblr, too.)

Three years ago, when The Gift of an Ordinary Day was published, a friend suggested it might be fun to make a video to go along with it. I invited my book group and some neighbors over, read a few pages out loud in front of the camera, and pulled a bunch of my husband’s family photos out of the albums. It was fun. And the video took on a life of its own, becoming a virtual messenger for the themes of the book.

This time, there was no question: Nowadays, nearly every new book arrives with its own book trailer video. The truth is, all of these new publishing to-dos have been making me anxious. Not only have I felt the pressure of making the book itself all it can be, but also the pressure of fulfilling my authorial obligation to initiate word of mouth about it in every possible venue: updating my website, planning a blog tour, producing a video, setting up events at bookstores. In other words, going public. (If you are someone who chooses to spend much of her life sitting quietly at home alone in a room, the prospect of making self-promotion your new full-time job — even if it is largely on-line — is enough to keep you awake at night. It does me.)

All summer the video project loomed. I had an idea, but no certainty that my vision would actually work. The friendly crew that filmed my first video had moved on. Finally, the deadline was upon me. I had no choice but to put my faith in the process, hire a couple of strangers to come film it, and begin.

And what I found myself thinking this week — as shooting began on my four-minute film, as Steve snapped countless potential author photos, as the book jacket was being finalized, and as plans for recording the audio version were made — is that much as things have changed in this business, it is STILL exacting attention to detail, and the concerted efforts of many passionate people, that make book publishing such a special and uniquely collaborative endeavor.

The scrapbooks of my publishing youth may be gone, my manuscript may exist in pixels instead of on paper, my book may not ever be reviewed in the pages of the Boston Globe or the New York Times, and yet the process remains as exacting and, in its own way, as deeply collegial, as viscerally satisfying, and as detail-oriented as ever.

The other day, three final jacket proofs arrived from the designer, real covers to be spread upon my dining room table, the type in each a slightly different shade of burnt orange. Which to choose? The audio producer sent me the script, printed out in large type, so that I’ll have time to practice reading it aloud before heading to New York next month to record in the studio; careful attention to detail is what will make our four days together go off without a hitch. And for two days, as our house became a film set and as Tom and Melissa of Long Haul Films shot hour upon hour of footage here, I marveled at their ability to maintain enthusiastic concentration as they focused their lenses upon the minutiae of my tactile, ordinary, everyday life and somehow turned it into art. Perhaps it is simply the willingness to pay such close attention, to bring such devotion to the details, that is, in the end, what lifts any process from mundane to meaningful.

It took one whole extra trip from Boston to New Hampshire to nail the shot the film makers wanted of hands around a steaming mug of tea. Six takes of zipping a jacket, tying up shoes. Lots of waiting around for the clouds to break and the sun to shine. Gracie, making tennis ball catch after tennis ball catch for the camera. And during that time, as my family and two dear friends willingly gave up big chunks of their day to assist in this project, and as a slew of last-minute emails arrived from Grand Central, my publisher in New York, I found myself feeling suddenly and immensely grateful for the entire team that fate and circumstance have brought together here, to help guide one modest midlife memoir into the world.

Of course, all this makes me see that what really matters to people who work with books has not changed at all in thirty years: A passion for a well-told story. A profound, ongoing love affair with words. The quiet thrill of holding a new hardcover in your hands, turning the first pages, receiving the urgent, insistent news that is shared between human beings when we summon the courage to reveal ourselves to one another.

In January, this book I’ve been laboring over for the last year and a half will be published. But the Magical Journey, I’m happy to say now, didn’t conclude with the final sentences I wrote last spring. In fact, that brief moment of ending simply marked the beginning of another journey, from the intensely private work of writing to the very public work of sharing. How lucky I am to be accompanied on this new path by such a dedicated group of friends and readers and co-workers, each of whom is as delighted by and as dedicated to the details as I am. Already I feel less alone. And even, dare I say it, excited about the next leg of the trip. Stay tuned!

I ordered Jena Strong’s first collection of poems, Don’t Miss This, a few weeks ago, just as soon as I read my friend Lindsey’s passionately enthusiastic review. Although I am a serial reader of memoir, it’s been a while since I allowed a new poet to enter my life. I’m a loyal re-reader of the poets I love, more likely to return to my handful of old favorites – Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Danna Faulds, Donald Hall, and Stanley Kunitz – than to tune my ear to a new voice, no matter how heralded.

But Jena’s book drew me immediately, in part because it is a memoir in poetry, a collection in which each poem stands fully and beautifully on its own while, at the same time, adding another strand to a story that I can’t imagine being told in any other way. As Jena explains, “The poems here trace a journey – to some extent in real time – through marriage, motherhood, sexual awakening, separation, and healing.”

I was startled, when I opened the book at random the day it arrived and began to read, to find myself in tears. Startled to feel such a powerful connection to this woman whose life path is so different from mine — who is so much younger than I am, and who is in the throes of mothering two small daughters, claiming her sexuality, coming out, and creating new relationships even as she struggles, with great care and compassion, to protect and honor the sanctity of old ones.

This, at a glance, is not the story of my life. And yet, it seemed as if every poem I read revealed to me something that is absolutely the story of my life. And what took my breath away was not the superficial details that separate me from this gifted young poet, but the slow, undeniable revelation of all that connects us: the intensity of emotion, the longing for self-acceptance, the faith that guides our steps and the sense of mystery that astonishes and humbles us as we make our slow, halting way forward. The love for our children, our spouses and partners and friends, and finally, for our own vulnerable, imperfect selves. The sustenance of seeing the sacred in the ordinary, the soul work of cultivating gratitude for a life that is not at all the one that was planned but that is, instead, the one we are meant to live. The courage to share a personal struggle, in the belief that it is only by revealing our cracks and fissures that we grow up spiritually, into our own true selves, at last.

To read this small, exquisitely written book and do it justice, I knew I needed to clear space. I needed to leave my cell phone on the kitchen counter, my work on my desk, the dishes in the sink. I needed to lie in the hammock beneath a vast, all-encompassing summer sky and allow myself the necessary luxury of deep reading. I have taken Jena’s title as a directive: don’t miss this. And so, today has been a first-page to last-page day, a vacation day right in the midst of everything, a gift to myself of time and poetry, beauty and kinship, summer air and chosen silence.

May you clear an essential space in your own life during this final month of summer and sink right down deep into something nourishing and good, something that feeds your soul. Take a chair outside, put your feet up, read a book that gives you back to yourself. Don’t miss this.

>SUMMER READING!

Last week, I gave away copies of Mary Oliver’s Collected Poems, Volumes One & Two. In the spirit of summer reading, and because I so enjoy sharing books I love, I’ve decided to give away a book each week during the month of August.

Jena’s book is available to purchase here. (And her lovely blog,about “waking up, making the coffee, and seeing what happens” is here.)

To be eligible to win a signed copy of Don’t Miss This, just leave a comment below, and tell me what YOU are reading this summer. I’ll draw a winner at random on Tuesday, August 7.

In the meantime, it’s a pleasure to share one of Jena’s poems, one I’ve read every day since the book arrived. (As I said, I am a devoted re-reader of poetry that speaks to me.) And if you’d like to read more about Don’t Miss This, click HERE to read Pamela Hunt Cloyd’s beautifully nuanced review.

What If?

What if you knew
that everything was going to be okay,
that something was in motion
beyond your field of vision,
beyond even the periphery
of your knowing?

What if you knew
that everything you want,
everything you’ve been seeking,
trying to figure out, missing,
is right here, already whole
in your hands, in your life?

What if taking in what is
could satisfy your longing?
What if you could rest your frantic, racing, busy mind
and rest your neglected, tired body,
put your head down in someone’s lap
to have your hair stroked,
like a cat, or a child?

What if you didn’t need to understand
how it works,
but could enjoy the magic
of how love shows itself
in the most unexpected, simplest of gestures?
What if everything is just as it should be?

What if nothing had to be better,
bigger, different, or other?
What would you do then?
Who would you be?