It’s been the summer of the b & b. Through all of the work of cleaning, weed-whacking, baking, working towards a wedding, helping my dear friends, I’ve been feeling the summer slip by. So little time on the lake, so little time to meander through the days.
But today, while one of the last loads of laundry spun, I read a wonderful story in Granta. Sitting in the shade of fluttering aspen leaves, I read ten pages and felt my inner world come back to me. Stop and smell the roses? I would say, better yet, stop and read a piece of literature. Then you just might reclaim what you thought you had lost.
Granta magazine is my go-to for short pieces, when a book is not at my fingertips or when I lack the energy to start something big. (Have you read the 700 + pages of The Gold Finch? Wonderful, but a real time commitment.)
So on this sunny day with monsoon rains left behind in August, I opened my new Granta, this edition entitled American Wild and read the first story, a piece of non-fiction by Anthony Doerr, “Thing With Feathers That Perches in the Soul.” What a beautiful title. This historical story set in Idaho is about love and making a home. With a lesson at the end:
“What lasts? Is there anything you’ve made in your life that will still be here 150 years from now? . . . What does not last, if they are not retold, are the stories.. . . Stories need to be resurrected, revivified, reimagined; otherwise they get bundled with us into our graves: a hundred thousand of them going into the ground every hour.
Or maybe they float a while, suspended in the places we used to be, waiting, hidden in plain sight, until a day when the sky breaks and the lights come on and the right person is passing by.
Outside the warehouse, the air seems smokier than before. The sky glows an apocalyptic yellow. Beneath a locust tree at the edge of the parking lot, doves hop from foot to foot. My hands tremble on the steering wheel. I start the engine but for a long minute I cannot drive.
It’s not that the stuff is still here. It’s not that the house still stands. It’s that someone keeps the stuff on shelves. It’s that someone keeps the house standing (Doerr, 21).”
Wow! Doerr is an author for me to check out for winter reading. Fall is coming and with it our early snow. No more reading outdoors but instead I hope hours by the fire, discovering new thoughts and new twists on old ones. Closing this post by wishing all of you great moments of reading and maybe someday a subscription to Granta🙂
P.S. The picture above is not the b & b! It’s a structure in New Jersey that came to mind when I read this story about a family and their log cabin in Idaho built in 1863.
The Big Picture 
Lovely sentiment; lovely post. I enjoyed it so much I forwarded it to Ina and my sister Renee.
The first sentence of the excerpt certainly grips you by the lapels, doesn’t it? And, the title is a breath stopper.
Ina has already replied and I will forward her comments to you – certainly coincidental, if you believe in coincidence.