Becca Rowan is a writer and the author of Life in General, a collection of essays about mid-life as experienced by an American woman in the 21st century. Becca loves creating connections by sharing stories on her popular blog.
Think back for a moment to the kind of desk you had in elementary school - say second or third grade. Mine was square, with a grey metal tub-like bottom and a faux-wood laminate top that lifted up. I often used the top of my head to prop that lid open while I rummaged around inside the general clutter that collected there: folders and looseleaf notebooks and chewed up pencils and erasers and mimeographed work sheets.
And books.
It feels oppressively hot this morning, a heat that seems incongruous in the face of crimson tipped leaves on the trees and fading blossoms on the impatiens. I’m not one who loves hot weather, and though I dread winter with every fiber of my being, I still prefer to be just chilly enough that I need to go to my closet for a soft sweater.
But weather - like life - is nothing if not surprising.
Happily, life has not surprised me this week. Mine is blessedly quiet, which means I’ve had plenty of time to read.
I don’t plan my reading ahead of time, although I have a shelf in my library of TBR books, I am easily digressed from that orderly line up. If something at the library takes my fancy, if I get a new recommendation online or from a friend, if I feel an old book calling my name off the shelf, I go wherever my fancy takes me.
Somehow in the past week I’ve latched on to reading about poet and novelist May Sarton, first reading her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, and then a biography by Margot Peters that I picked up at a library book sale.
This historical novel is quite a departure for author Meg Waite Clayton, and it was a highly successful one for this reader. The Race for Paris is set in WWII, before the liberation of Paris by the Allied forces. The novel traces the journey of two female journalists - photographer Olivia and reporter Jane - who go AWOL from the press corps in order to reach Paris with the Allies and capture the first moments of liberation to preserve for posterity, enlisting the aid of Fletcher, a British military photographer who shepherd’s them through the French countryside toward the city.
Hot summer days have been working their soporific effect, and I curl up in my deck chair with the best intentions to read or write and find myself drifting in that amorphous territory between sleep and wakefulness, the sensations of warm breeze, birdsong, and rustling leaves mingling in my semi-consciousness with the characters in my book.
