In the Spring

Some of my regular readers ("Hi, Mom!") might be wondering if I stopped reading two months ago. The short answer is no. The long answer, well, it all started with Toronto. Despite reservations at the Downtowner and an afternoon crying while watching a Canadian-Irish film, I did enjoy the parts of the trip I spent reading. I hadn't planned on reading that much, and set out early on Saturday to see the sights. However, as most of the Toronto shops didn't open until 11, I hunkered down in the Second Cup and took out the novel I had packed, Jeffrey Lent's In the Fall.

Divided into several generations of stories, In the Fall lent itself well to the sporadic timing of travel reading. A few minutes on a metro here or several hours in the park across from there and I was back in Vermont with the Pelhams. I opened to the point where Norman is walking home after the Civil War with his new bride Leah.

Later that afternoon, on a long bus ride to here, I began the part where Norman's youngest son Jamie leaves home and tries to make his way as a bootlegger.

The next day, after I had passed through customs and "turned my change into GOLD" for the Canadian ski team, I ended up at my gate several hours too early. I welcomed the wait, though, since I had also arrived at the most gripping part of the book. After Jamie dies, his son Foster finds a stack of letters from an aunt he never knew about. Foster meets his aunts and learns that his grandmother was a runaway slave. He has just knocked on a door in Sweetboro, North Carolina to confront a man about his grandmother's past. So after arriving home and sitting down to write a reaction, I succumbed to a bout of writer's block. Who wouldn't after reading a writer like Lent? But then all blogging got shelved for a funeral, a disheartening parent-teacher conference, a box of Bob books, 72 final exams, a job offer in Ann Arbor, a graduation, an uninvited house guest or two, and a potty-training toddler. We'll see what happens in the summer.