Almost July

 How can it be the last time I wrote a blog it was April??? Where have I been? What have I been doing? I think even moving and all of that jazz last year, I still wrote more than I have this year. 

We got back from Tucson and watching the kids while, Kessie and her family moved to a new house. That was the mountain we saw when we looked out the back of the house we rented. Tucson is nice, but really hot. This was the first time we flew. I like driving better I think, but it was nice to get home after an hour and half flight. 

That was the other mountain we could see. How I would love to get closer to it. I have been sewing a little since I got back and hooking a little. But mostly I have been reading. In 2020 I stopped going to the library. Mainly because my branch was closed for remodeling. I could go to a different branch, but for awhile it wasn't opened and then it was for pickup only. I just didn't want to do that so I got a Kindle. 

I went back to the library to my newly remodeled branch the beginning of June. When I walked in I was greeted like a old friend, by the building as well as the wonderful staff. It was like finally I got to come home. I do love the touch and feel of books. With my Kindle I was introduced to new authors and new genres that  I have never read before. I also read more books on the Kindle but never the same type of enjoyment reading from a real book.  

I picked up books, by Elisabeth Goudge, Rumor Godden, M.M. Kaye and Dick Francis. Books that I haven't read in awhile. When  I woke up this morning, my first thought was, I have an empty calendar. I don't have a single thing on it. It is like finding a whole box of the yummiest box of chocolates and having the job of choosing which one I want. That is how it feels today. After a very, very busy spring and now summer. I have an empty calendar. 

  My grandson texted me this morning, and said, " We are sending pictures for rugs for our new house." 

I will enjoy making rugs for them in their new house. Soon. Because I do love everything about rug hooking too. 

Now though, I am enjoying reading and going to the library. When I think of summer, it reminds me of the smell of the chlorine in the  swimming pool, the hot toasty smell of the flowers and the grass in the yard. The sound of the trees in the summer breeze and the idea of sitting in a tree with a book and living in different worlds. When I read books I am reminded how you are sharing a brain with someone. You are reading their thoughts and incorporating their world view in to your own. I still believe that reading is one of the powerful things a person can do. As I am older now, I am much more careful of what I read. I can go back to books I read as a child or young woman and I am so surprised that thoughts I have claimed as my own are really not but another persons thoughts. So I realize that I am not really me, but lots of people who have influenced me and have been my role model. All because of having a library to spend time in during the summer.

I always had our children in summer reading programs. I don't know if they loved it as much as I did, but what I loved on hot summer afternoons when we would all be in the living room sitting quietly reading our books from the library. My library here is much smaller now. I really need to go through it again and clean out the weeds that seem to crop up here from time to time. While in Tucson, helping to pack up books, I ran across the books that had come from our house and now live in the library of our grandchildren. How happy it makes me to know that the books our children read are now being read again. Every book I picked up and asked the kids, " Have you read this? Did you like it? Tell me what you thought?" They had read them all and they had a opinion of that book and they could quote a line from it that they liked. I was quite astounded and very blessed. Knowing that this is the third generation to meet the friends and acquaintances that I met so long ago. I loved that one of my grand daughters loved Ramona Quimbly. She said she has read all of those books over and over. I loved that they don't realize that already they just love books and there is no reading level they just read because they like it. 

I have just written this post, only about books and my love for them. Not really much else. I am glad that on the first day of my summer vacation, I could write a blog. 

I hope you are all enjoying your summer too. Its nice to be back.

~Kim~

"Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never became what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never became them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we will miss them always."

Elisabeth Enright.