Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Day 112 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and my mother is reading Good Grief, by Lolly Winston, because she needed something to read while visiting her sister, and Pam had finished it, so Mom borrowed it!

I love the fuzzy pink slippers on the cover.

Mom says it is a quick and easy read, and it sounds like classic chick lit, which I was able to semi-define for my daughter, having studied up on it here, in past entries, and by asking around! Amazingly, in this book, the humor and cheerfulness abound in a novel really about grief. The main character is a widow at 36.

And I have no trouble believing in the rebounding joy here, as I met, this spring, a woman who had also lost her husband, young, to cancer, and was juggling grief, joy, and children like a pro in the circus of life. People are so amazing, so resilient, so beautiful. Oh, people, I wish you, too, boundless joy and some way through your inevitable griefs.

Recently I borrowed and read Donald Hall's book of poems, The Painted Bed, because a poet friend wanted me to read it. She warned me that it would be dark and raw, and it was. These are poems of grief at the loss of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, also to cancer. Though written over a period of years, the poems are fresh in sorrow and rage. In fact, I could not make it through all of them, but it was time to return the book, so I did. If I need more woe, I can turn to Kenyon's own Collected Poems, here in my office, sitting atop Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

And now the sun is shining, and I will go gaze at the Ohio blue spiderwort blooming on the north side of the house.