February 19, 2015

A Lot of Somethings




1988, Christmas in the big house.



I’ve been slowly absorbing the newest volume of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries and letters, "Against Wind and Tide."  I can’t read it in great chunks as I have done her other books, and in fact I have been able to absorb only a few small chapters at a time. 

These are much edited diaries and letters, and the editors didn’t leave out of depressions or sadness instead compressed the writings.  From the period just after the war until her grandson’s Jonathan’s death in 1986, at a similar age when she lost her first born son, the editors offer us a much slimmer volume than I expected.

I’ve been taking breaks with the Dali Lama, Thomas Merton…his editors leaned toward Christianity, and a bit of a mystery here or there.  Today I finished Against the Wind and Tide.

I had wanted to feel more triumph when her volume on aloneness was such a big success.  Perhaps more details.  I hoped for more details, if they existed, on how she created the previous volumes of her diaries and letters not just a note here or there on the struggle.  Once her husband had died, she found herself alone with family gone and friends dying.   She was unexpectedly lonely.  At the end, I completely understand her inability to gather her notes on aging into a book.  “A note book perhaps,” she writes.  I too grow slower.  Many of her thoughts on age and widowhood are in this book thanks to her editors.

She had a series of strokes and died before the news of Charles Lindbergh’s three European families came to light.  I’m so glad.

Her writings stir me to write more in my own journal pages.  I write so little these days when before I filled pages with my notes.  I often wonder if there is anyone at home here.  Then again, no one is pushing me down Abbott street in a shopping cart or chasing me with a machete, so I just need to bestir myself to make more from nothing at all.




  • Himself:  No snow wrecks yet.  Pre winter stuff.  Life will get interesting then.
  • Me: A few books came in to the store.  I took back two shelves that had been given over to CD’s.  A http://museums.alaska.gov/quiltexhibit/quiltspdf/YoYo.pdf>Yo Yo quilt came in.  It took me hours to find out what it was called and get a guess on the price.
  • Reading: Jacqueline Winspeer’s “A Lesson in Secrets."
  • Balance:Shelving books today.
 

8 comments:

  1. Journaling is very hard to maintain, for sure. But what you write will be of value to those who will remain after you are gone. Kind of a morbid thought, maybe, but people like to know about their ancestors' lives.

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  2. This is why you write a blog though it is sometimes difficult to express yourself online.

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  3. No machetes, my dear. Absolutely no machetes.

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  4. February is a big reading month for me. I'm right behind you reading Winspeer’s "The Mapping of Love and Death." Love her books. Been alternating with Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mysteries.

    I started a dream journal yesterday, hoping to get writing again and trying to make something out of all the sleeping I'm doing this winter. ;-)

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  5. February is a big reading month for me. I'm right behind you reading Winspeer’s "The Mapping of Love and Death." Love her books. Been alternating with Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mysteries.

    I started a dream journal yesterday, hoping to get writing again and trying to make something out of all the sleeping I'm doing this winter. ;-)

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  6. So many good books.. such little time.

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  7. I can see that you guys needed those great big glasses to read all those books:-)

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  8. Oh my gosh!!! I just read about Lindbergh. That is incredible! I'm just totally blown away. I can't believe he did that and had all those children.

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