finishing school

what a day! 
Left home on a pale-sun morning, met friend at coffee shop, brought knitting and news. As we talked, drank lattes and tea,  bolts of lightening and rumbling thunder forced us to look out the window. It was snowing and hailing heavily, people began pouring into the Manila Cafe seeking a port in a storm. After a half hour or so the drama stopped, sun returned, people drifted out. When I left I had to clear off four inches of snow from my car. It seems that the squall only hit Ranchos because when I got home, ten miles north, the roads were dry and I was told that no snow had fallen. It seemed that my car was the only one with heaps of snow on it. Very strange. But not as strange as that July 4th a few years ago, when we drove through a snowstorm that stopped traffic on the interstate north of Albuquerque.

count 'em
Finished another cheerful pair of socks deliberately not matched. Who wants to follow rules when colors sing the way these do.

And speaking of finishing, I just finished reading my first John Banville novel, The Sea. He's from Dublin, Ireland, has won numerous prestigious awards and his writing is exquisite.

He has the most uncanny way of dropping gradually deeper and deeper into his characters' psyches while braiding bits of this and that into an elegant compelling whole. His prose has been described as "precise and hauntingly beautiful". Yes. I'd never heard of him but a poet friend talked about his books and told me how she'd recently ordered several from a used bookseller. I was anxious to read him since I respect this woman's own talent and opinion. Highly recommended.

...I felt that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being, for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me..."


...we fought in order to feel, and to feel real...
              John Banville (The Sea)