Archive: Favorites

You bring out the New England in me. Stepping out into your biting wind and chilling rain makes my Connecticut blood flow ever strong, determined to not be cold yet. I am hardy, Yankee stock, and I know to put on a real coat for morning walks so that I can nonchalantly lift the hood in a sudden shower of stinging drops. Bring it on, November.

You’re that strange doorway between fall flamboyance and winter drear. One day, red maple leaves litter the sidewalk like rose petals at a wedding; the next day, they’re battered down with rain and mud. Bright leaves flutter to the pavement, exposing the stark skeletons of their parent trees. Silhouettes of branches and twigs are clearly delineated against dense, cloudy skies. How very Wuthering Heights of you, November.

You tempt me to fatten up for the long, hard winter ahead. Howling winds and gray atmospheres prick longings for steaming mugs of tea and mulled cider, preferably with a beef stew or chicken pot pie to go along for the ride. We must not forget that the holiday of food holidays, Thanksgiving, is in your territory. Turkey, gravy, stuffing, and all that is pumpkin and cranberry — plus the requisite food coma, the first step of hibernation — belong to you, November.

You don’t make it easy for me, though. Mornings like the one today make it hard to advocate in your defense that you are not that bad. There was a brief moment when I heard my alarm and thought, “Oh, wait, I can just turn it off because today is Saturday!” Just kidding, I heard you mock, and I remembered that it was only Tuesday. Not that I didn’t want to walk Ted or go to work, but they fell so far below the charm of staying in my cozy bed that you make so attractive, November, darn you.

You smacked me in the face with all you had to offer. Your biting air, icy rain, and blustery wind pelted Ted and me. Most would shy away from aggressive tactics, but not me. I am a warm-coat-wearing, thick-blooded, Puritan-minded New Englander and I can take it. Your cold slap only snaps me into alertness and spurs me on to whatever I have in front of me, so I don’t mind at all. You’re a challenge that I relish standing up to face because I can see you for what you are: merely an awkward transition stage, full of gawky adolescence and angst. I don’t love you, November, but I don’t hate you, either. You, too, shall pass.

I am kind of a snob about fall. Every year around the end of September, I go on a tirade every few days about how in New England, fall came when school started and you could actually wear your new fall clothes instead of wearing shorts for another month and the leaves would change color gradually and have time to stay on the trees, whereas around here, you blink and miss the fall color before you have to rake it all up and what is it about the mid-Atlantic and their short falls when it’s the best season ever and then we just get plunked right down into winter right away and there is no reason for it to be so hot right now and I hate being hot so why can’t fall just get here like it does in New England, where fall came when school started…

JG just rolls his eyes at me, tells me I have a rough life. “I know,” he says, mockingly unsympathetic. “Fall is so much better in New England and I’m sorry that you have to put up with what we have here in Pennsylvania.”

Hmph.

A part of me misses New England all the time, but in the fall, I really feel the twinge. I feel cheated out of a good, solid, cool fall in this area and even more so when I have to sweat through August, September, and even into October. I have been waiting for rusty treetops, cheerful chrysanthemums, and rattling leaf skeletons. I have been longing for brighter-than-blue blue skies, blustery gusts, and snappy morning chills. I have been straining against heat and humidity for the fresh, invigorating nip of cold air on my cheeks, the chance to inhale deeply through my nose, and the promise that — yes, and soon! — allergies will be gone for the year. I have been craving excuses to wear corduroy, my red scarf, light wool sweaters, and slippers, though not necessarily all at once. I have been eager to carve a jack-o’-lantern, decorate with miniature gourds, make a pumpkin cheesecake, and dig out my costume tiara. I have been hungry for stew, roasted chicken, bratwurst, and candy corn. I have been sniffing the air for the aroma of apples, dry leaves, bonfires, and hot chocolate. I have been ready, even if my favorite season wasn’t ready for me.

Fall has been a long time coming, but today, it is finally here and I hope it sticks around long enough for me to enjoy it properly. At the very least, JG will be spared the Rant of Mid-Atlantic Fall this weekend because I’ll be out under a saturated blue sky, crunching on leaves, and sipping apple cider. Cheers.

For me, considering writing means considering reading because the two are complementary pieces of a continuous process. In growing as a writer, I try to read strong writing, which helps to inform what I write afterward. As a result, I read quite a lot.

When I’m asked for the title of my favorite book, I’m hard-pressed to narrow it down to just one. However, when asked for my best-loved author, the answer is quick: Madeleine L’Engle. She is probably best-known for A Wrinkle in Time, but over the past ten years, I’ve collected more than thirty of her books and I love revisiting them from time to time.

When I was in high school, I always carried a book with me (you know, just in case I had to wait somewhere) and it was usually a L’Engle novel like A House Like a Lotus or The Arm of the Starfish. A friend once asked me if I felt strange carrying around “a kid’s book,” but the thought that I was reading juvenile fiction hadn’t really fazed me. In the end, it was all good, fun reading with strange creatures and exotic locales like Portugal and Antarctica. Who cared where they stored them in bookstores? Madeleine L’Engle has been a constant reading source for me, holding my hand through the early years of novel-reading and then pacing me through more introspective memoirs. I learned to love the feeling of new words on my tongue and on my mind — tesseract, ontology, mitochondria, magnanimous — and relish the thrill of wrapping my head around the plot, emotional process, or thought journey I was following. She is my go-to for a comfort read and I’m still hunting down books for my collection. The satisfaction at the end of the pursuit is always worth it.

Partly for Janssen, but mostly for the general good, here are my most highly-recommended Madeleine L’Engle books, with explanations for my favorites. I’ve had this idea brewing for a while, but in light of her recent passing, I think now is a good time to share and remember. I already miss her, in a way.

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A Swiftly Tilting Planet
I recommend the entire Time Quartet wholeheartedly. Sure, they’re youth fiction, but I dare any adult to grasp the full meaning of any of these books in the first try. A Swiftly Tilting Planet is my favorite of the series and I have no fewer than three copies of it on my shelves: the copy I grew up reading (can’t trash that), a copy of the reissue circa 2001 (ooh, pretty new covers), and the hardcover, signed copy that a friend bought me. So, clearly, the redundancy is justified. I really like the book’s theme of interdependence and the ancient rune as the structure for the chapters and the story. It never gets old for me, even after the sixth time through.

Two-Part Invention
In this memoir, L’Engle shares about her marriage and trials during her husband’s battle with cancer. Even though it sounds depressing, I love what she says about love. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read about a real, strong, committed relationship. At one point, when JG and I were dating, I suggested that he read Two-Part Invention, which was a personal risk of sorts because I identified so deeply with it. I was half-afraid of my reaction if JG, the person I thought I was going to marry, didn’t like it at all. When JG returned the book to me, he was full of high praise, much to my relief. The best thing he said was, “I feel like I know you better after having read this book.”

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• If you feel unsuccessful: A Circle of Quiet
• If you want a great novel: A Live Coal in the Sea
• If you want another great novel: A Severed Wasp
• If you are religious: The Genesis Trilogy
• If you need a baby gift: The Other Dog
• If you have suffered a loss (and you like dolphins): A Ring of Endless Light
• If you are in the mood for intrigue (and you like penguins): Troubling a Star
• If you have a best friend: Friends for the Journey

#25, #27

Sunday Scribblings #76: Writing

[September 20 edit: A lovely tribute at Slate.]

The wedding this weekend was lovely. The bride was radiant, the groom was grinning, and the bride’s parents were frazzled to just the right degree. JG’s high school friends, including dates to freshman homecoming and junior prom, were astounded that his wife coerced him into dancing after all these years. I made small talk with JG’s parents’ friends and did my best to take pictures despite less-than-ideal lighting. To my surprise, I realized that I really enjoy going to weddings.

JG and I are at the point in our lives when we should be inundated with weddings. We’re a few years out from college graduation and the time has come for our peers to start entering into wedded bliss, especially in the summers. Apparently, our friends didn’t get the memo, because this summer of two weddings has been the most wedding-crowded so far. It seems as though our close friends are just peachy being single while their friends are tying knots. As a result, we hear a lot of stories about weddings we didn’t witness and our own wedding circle is fairly limited. I’m sure that my affection for the events is tied to the slim number of weddings I’ve been obligated to attend and the fact that I’ve never been a bridesmaid.

That said, I take great pleasure in putting on what I’ve affectionately termed “the wedding uniform” — little black dress, pearl earrings, pink wrap — and being a wedding bystander. I love to ooh and ahh over the bride coming down the aisle, wonder what lies under the white wedding cake icing, and dance to numbers like “The Way You Look Tonight” or “Living on a Prayer”. I enjoy the fact that JG and I get all gussied up to celebrate our friends on a day that they look their best and happiest.

Most of all, I like weddings because they automatically make me think back to our own. When the organ struck up the strains of Canon in D, JG’s ears perked up and he whispered, “It’s our wedding song.” When Liz and Andy both said, “’til death do us part,” we squeezed each other’s hands. When I signed the guestbook photo mat, I couldn’t help but think of the framed photo in our house that boasts, in the bottom-left corner, good wishes from the bride and groom we were celebrating that night. When we lit 3-foot sparklers to wave off the couple in their horse and buggy, I thought fondly of the bubbles we customized with hand-tied knots. In a strange, echoing way, each wedding JG and I have attended together has been a memorial to that hot June day more than two years ago when I wore a J. Crew dress, he made all the women cry from his tears on the altar, and we made our getaway in a ’95 Subaru Legacy packed with presents and shedding streamers all the way home.

Weddings are an excuse for me — a painfully pragmatic, left-brained girl — to be a little sentimental and think back to my big day, but the short escape into romanticism isn’t what I really treasure. At our friends’ wedding over the weekend, we witnessed vows, clinked our glasses for kisses, and admired the couple’s rings, but in doing so, we restated our vows, kissed each other, and marveled at the rings on our fingers.