Category Archives: The Seasons: Summer

August Reading

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The Reader, by Renoir…

Hello, dear friends. I’m checking in to give you an update on my August reading and some of the things going on in my life right now.

I am back to my reading, although my blogging isn’t back full time.  I’m still taking things one step at a time these days, and that’s not a bad way to live. But I’m happy that my focus has improved to the point that I can fully enjoy my reading again. I love my afternoon reading times, but I’ve discovered an early morning time that has also become a favorite time for reading.

August was full of pretty miserable heat and drought here in Oregon, but we finally had some rain and cooler temperatures to end the month. Also at the end of the month, I mustered up the courage to visit some dear friends in Southern Utah and had an absolutely wonderful time. It was my first trip without Byron… but since these were friends that knew Byron right from the beginning of our relationship 54 years ago, it was a very healing trip and Byron was with us in our happy memories shared.

Along with my reading, I’ve been watching as many of the Studio Ghibli films as I can. Byron really enjoyed those films, and so I’ve set up a mini film festival for myself and have had so much fun watching them. I also watched a fascinating 4-part documentary called 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki, the brilliant imagination behind Studio Ghibli, and learned a lot about his art and his life.

So, the books I read in August:

I hope your August was filled with good books, good films, and good friends, too!

Tuck Everlasting

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In mindfulness practice, we are guided to return to our “center” when our mind wanders. That center can be the breath, or a sound to focus on, but something that will draw the mind back to the practice, to the focus of the moment. Reading children’s books does something similar for me. It centers me, and reminds me of my deep love of reading…and reminds me of who I am deep inside.

Revisiting the beautiful story, Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, was a gift I gave myself at the beginning of this August. This last year has been such a profound one for me, full of losses, and, in all honesty, at times I have felt that I’ve lost myself. Reading brings me back to my center. And this story especially, about life and death and the idea of living forever, was a reminder of just how precious life is…and that “Life’s got to be lived, no matter how long or short,” she said calmly. “You got to take what comes. We just go along, like everybody else, one day at a time.” 

From the Publisher:

Doomed to – or blessed with – eternal life after drinking from a magic spring, the Tuck family wanders about trying to live as inconspicuously and comfortably as they can. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster stumbles on their secret, the Tucks take her home and explain why living forever at one age is less a blessing that it might seem. Complications arise when Winnie is followed by a stranger who wants to market the spring water for a fortune.

Favorite Quotes:

“Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.”

“Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.”

“I don’t want to die.”
“No,” said Tuck calmly. “Not now. Your time’s not now. But dying’s part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can’t pick the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing. But it’s passing us by us Tucks. Living’s heavy work, but off to one side, the way we are, it’s ‘useless, too. It doesn’t make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I’d do it in a minute. You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.”

I loved rereading this book at this stage of my life. Through the lens of age and grief, I deeply appreciated the honesty given the ideas, and the beauty of the language expressing them. It truly is a timeless classic, and a timeless gift from the author, Natalie Babbitt,

The First Week of August

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One of my all-time favorite books is Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting. And the first paragraph in that book absolutely captures, perfectly describes, the first week of August!

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.

Don’t you agree?

A Summer of Flowers

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At the garden center…

My daughter and I love to garden. I will say right off, though, that her thumb is greener than mine! She and her husband (who also loves gardening) have an amazing garden and yard! I’m always in awe of their vegetables and their abundance of beautiful flowers and shrubs. They inspire me!  After I had the dangerous oak tree removed from the back corner of our yard last fall, I found that I had a new patch of sunshine where there had always been shade. So I created my “Sunshine Garden,” a small patch for vegetables, inspired by Jamie and her husband. In the rest of the yard, I’ve focused on flowers.

Whenever Jamie comes to visit me, we inevitably take a trip to the garden centers nearby. We love the inspiration we get from those trips. But in recent years, much of our gardening inspiration has also come from one particular flower farm owner and author, Erin Benzakein, of Floret Flower Farm. She and her husband, Chris, started Floret Flower Farm over 15 years ago, and they sell flower seeds to devoted followers internationally. Jamie and I love to order seeds from her!

 

Erin has published three books, all of them filled with excellent information and gorgeous photography. Her husband, Chris, is the photographer and over the years has documented their flower journey and their extensive research with what must be millions of photos by now.  They are an impressive team!

 

There is also a two season Emmy-nominated documentary series about them, available on MAX or through Prime VIdeo. It is a beautifully filmed account of their experiences with beginning such a business, their struggles and successes over the years, the people they hired to help them fulfill their dream, and the phenomenal effort of all involved. I found the documentary to be very moving as well as inspirational.

Whether you are a seasoned gardener or a beginner, I urge you to check out the Floret Flower Farm website for inspiration, education (very helpful video classes!), and special sales on their wonderful and unusual flower seeds. I am sure that you, too, will become a major fan and follower of Floret Farms!

Art by Mary Englebreit…

August Reflections and September Plans

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Hello, my friends. It’s time for some reflecting on life and reading in the month of August. It was another rather intense month, but flew by amazingly quickly. I’m proud to say that I actually finished reading two books during that month! Focusing on my reading has been a challenge with everything going on in our lives right now, but I decided to return to a much loved book, Persuasion, by Jane Austen, and just enjoy whatever reading time I could find. It was such a pleasure! The book and the simple act of reading! And then I ended up the month reading a book by another favorite author, Edith Nesbitt. The Story of the Treasure Seekers was a reminder of how childhood used to be a time of intense innocence and imagination.

The end of August also brings my favorite Fall reading challenge. Although I can hardly take on a bigger challenge than life itself right now, I’m going to join the Readers Imbibing Peril XVII challenge and read as much as time allows. I have a dear friend (a high school friend!) that loves the Fall and this kind of Fall reading, but he’s still a university professor and therefore doesn’t have the time to participate. But we both love Ray Bradbury, and he is inspiring me to read more of Bradbury’s stories and novels, so I’ve decided to make that my focus of my RIP reading this year!

My Readers Imbibing Peril XVII reading list!

On the home front, August brought another major change in our journey through cancer. Byron’s chemotherapy stopped working, just that quickly after 6 successful infusions. It was not unexpected but it was disappointing nonetheless. So he is now on hospice, and August was spent getting settled into that new reality, and focusing on finding the right combination of medications that would manage his pain more efficiently so that he can have some comfortable quality of life during this stage. We are so appreciative of our new hospice team! They work incredibly hard to manage his comfort care, and we feel very supported and cared for.

On our “Walk ‘n Roll.”

When I use the word “hospice,” I find that people assume that death is imminent. That’s what I always thought, too. But now we know that although hospice is “end of life care,” there’s a period of time before the final decline that can be much longer than anticipated. That’s where we are right now, this week — in the calm of pain management and improved quality of life. Byron is still able to care for himself and work on his home projects and his reading. Because he is quite disabled due to the cancer in his hip and pelvis, he  requested a wheel chair from our hospice team, and so we are able to get out for early morning walks as often as we can now. Being outside and surrounded by beauty feeds our souls! Our daughter calls these cherished walks, our “Walk ‘n Roll” time.

I hope that you had a good August, my friends, and will have a book-filled and enjoyable September.

July Reflections

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I look at this old photo that I took at the Salt Flats near the Utah/Nevada border and marvel at the calmness of that morning a few years ago. July has been a tumultuous month, plain and simple, but we are here at a calm spot at the end of this month, taking some deep breaths before moving into August.

Once again, I did not get much reading done this month. Too much Life happening. But yesterday I actually sat down with a new graphic novel, called Dancing at the Pity Party, by Tyler Feder, and started reading again. It felt wonderful to just sit and read on a hot afternoon!

I was also able to finish my Classics Club Spin book, so I’ll try to post my review of The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle,  in the next few days.

Stay cool in this summer heat, my friends!

My July in brief:

  • Heat! Although we haven’t reached the 113 degree temperatures of last summer, we’ve had too many 100+ days this month. No central air conditioning in our old home, so we spend much of our day and night managing the fans and window air conditioners so that we can keep the house as cool as possible. It’s been a challenge!
  • Our grandson and Scottie’s Drive-In.  Our precious grandboy (I probably should call him our “grandman” now because he’s over 6 feet tall and very much a teenager) helps us on weekends. He mows the lawns for us and, afterwards, we provide his current favorite meal —a hamburger and fries from our local burger joint, Scottie’s Drive-In.
  • Watching TV. We love getting caught up in a good series on TV, and that happened this month with the Netflix series, Our Blues, a South Korean drama that takes place on Jeju Island. We were captured by the intertwining lives of the various characters, and loved our glimpse into another part of Korean culture. The cinematography was especially beautiful.
  • Remembering my Mom. July 18th marked four years since my Mom’s passing, and I shared photos on my instagram account of the gorgeous sunset we experienced as we left her apartment the night we said goodbye to her. I miss her every day, but I have so many special memories that make me smile.
  • Red Clover.  You may remember my photos of Crimson Clover that fills the agricultural fields around here with brilliant red in early May. Well, the crops of “red clover” bloom in mid-July, and are gorgeous in their more subtle color. Up close, they look pink, not red. And when you look at a field of them, they look a pale lavender color! A crop that is so mis-named!
  • Studying Spanish. I just reached a milepost in my attempt to regain my fluency in Spanish. I’ve worked on it, using the program Duolingo, every single day for 200 days! I’m rather proud of my learning streak, but I’m even happier to be regaining so much of the language I lost due to not using it very much since my year in Argentina as an exchange student. “Use it or lose it” is so true!
  • Byron and his treatments. July was cruel to us. The most difficult thing about Byron’s battle with cancer is the metastases in the bones of his hip. In early July, he suffered a pain flare and after a trip to the ER and many tests over a two week period, it was discovered that he has a series of fractures in that hip joint. So being able to go upstairs to sleep has become too difficult. We now have a hospital bed situated in the bay window of our dining room area, and I’m happy to say that it’s a very workable arrangement for now!

 

 

 

Summertime

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Mt. Hood in the distance…

I was getting to the point of thinking that summer would never come! Record rainfall here in the Pacific Northwest, and what felt like endless gray days, weighed heavily on us although the moisture gave us spectacular spring color. But now…just like that…Summer has arrived with sunshine, blue skies, and much warmer temperatures. I’m actually having to water the garden now!

My reading has slowed down with more time spent working on taming the garden. Our weekly schedule is filled up with doctors’ appointments, but we also enjoy our every-three-weeks visits from our daughter, and an occasional [very short but very much appreciated] outing. But I I look forward to reading on the porch more often now. Summer reading time is here!

Books in progress:

New books that arrived this week:

 

Porch pots in full bloom…

 

Mid-August and Hunkered Down

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Birdwatching and watching the birdwatchers. Plus, smoky air!

We are well into mid-August and the usual heat of summer has been replaced by the especially miserable record-breaking heat, drought, fire, and smoky air. We do all our errands in the early morning, occasionally picking up a cup of coffee at Starbucks and then hanging out at Fern Hill Wetlands watching the birds and the birdwatchers. Then, it’s home to hunker down as the heat of the day builds up and the air becomes worse. And I must add that the hunkering down is also part of our daily protection plan for my husband’s compromised immune system during this time of raging variants!

So, all that sounds pretty grim, but the nice thing about it all is that we are getting a lot of reading done, are enjoying watching our current K-drama during the day instead of after dinner, and are having fun trying out new recipes. Adjust and Adapt!

Woman Reading, by Henri Ottmann

Books read and enjoyed in the last few weeks:

A Song for Lonely Wolves, by Lee Evie. The first book in a new mystery/detective series that takes place during the Joseon Dynasty in Korean history. The main character is a talented young female detective during a period of time when women were not valued. A very interesting historical fiction mystery. I’m looking forward to reading on in the series when the new books come out.

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Notes on Grief is a short book by Chimamanga Ngozi Adichie about the death of her father during the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown last year. (He did not die of Covid.) It is a beautifully written account of his sudden death and the grief that followed, complicated by the restrictions of the pandemic. “I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.”  It is a deeply personal, yet completely universal, story, and I appreciated her honesty and her sharing her grief with us. I wrote down many quotes from this book because I know they will give me strength later on.   “Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”

My emotions are like a roller coaster these days, since my husband’s diagnosis. We have days that are “mostly normal” and days where waves of sadness hit us hard. So after reading Notes on Grief, I decided to return to the kind and gentle world of Miss Read’s Fairacre. I picked up the 15th volume in the series, Village Centenary, and read it through in a short few days. It was an absolute delight, and exactly what my soul needed. In this book, the village celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the village school. Most of the residents of Fairacre went to the school, and the town comes together to honor the old school with a wonderful celebration at the end of the year. “There was no doubt about it, Fairacre School was the heart of our village, and memories of their own schooldays quickened the adults’ response to this tribute to its hundred years.”  What a lovely series, and this was one of my favorites of the ones I’ve read so far.

We are currently enjoying watching the South Korean drama, Bossam: Steal the Fate. It’s a highly entertaining series about a man of the Joseon Dynasty who mistakenly kidnaps the widowed daughter of the king. Bossam” was a “customary remarriage procedure” during that period of time. “A widow could not remarry. A single man or widower would kidnap the widow and marry her. Some of the kidnappings were agreed upon in advance and others were by force.” So a man could be hired to do the kidnapping, but things went awry with this particular job!  It is both humorous and serious, with wonderful acting, costuming, and filming — just a fun and very addictive historical drama.

Aside from reading and watching historical South Korean dramas, keeping my garden alive in the heat this summer has been a full-time job. I have to get it all watered before the heat builds up, so I start early and finish before noon. Fortunately, my zinnias like the heat!

 

 

May and June…where’d they go?

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Daughter and me at our favorite garden center.

Oh my goodness. Yes, we have a lot going on here, but May and June just seemed to get lost in the shuffle of busy-ness. Reading has slowed down, gardening has sped up. In both May and June, all of us now vaccinated, we enjoyed a couple of visits with our daughter. We took a one day road trip to see her home and garden after 15 months of not being able to travel. Then, her visits in May and in June to our place. When she comes for a visit, there’s a lot of garden stuff that happens. We always visit our favorite garden centers, AND she helps in my garden! She weeds my flower beds and makes things look so nice. Her way of “helping,” which is a major understatement!

Two days after she left this last time, I was outside picking our bumper crop of cherries which took three busy days. I hustled to pick as many as I could before THE heat event hit the Pacific Northwest. Then I spent my mornings watering to keep things alive in the intense heat, and afternoons in retreat from the most intense heat I’ve ever experienced. Thinking back over the last two months, it’s no wonder I am feeling very fatigued! But here I am, checking in and letting you know I am still here, and still reading!

Books finished in May and June:

Hopefully, with the hot afternoons of July upon us, I will be getting more reading done while staying cool indoors parked in front of our window air conditioner. And hopefully, we won’t have a repeat of that record-breaking heat wave! I don’t want to repeat those three days of 104, 109, and 112 degrees!

I hope this post finds you enjoying your summer, and that it is filled with sunshine and books…and nice mild temperatures!