Sunday, July 6 - Monday, July 7

The drive home yesterday was long, but we made it, and now the next part of our summer will begin. We were all very sad to leave. We needed a few more days there to lie in our hammocks and play Rummikub; we had some busy days the second week we were there, and we needed a few more days of our regular NH routines, with the kids screaming nonsense on the floating dock, Andrew puttering around the barn, me moving from place to place with my book. But two and a half weeks--not bad at all. Not bad at all.

Today Andrew left for Peru, and I worked from home, and the kids slept very (very) late and are once again ensconced in their rooms. The rhythms are so different here. 

A bright spot was when Lucia and I were talking about her required summer reading for her tenth-grade English class (three books by American authors; it's an American lit class), and she seemed flummoxed about what books to select. (The guidelines gave categories--book by a Black American author, book with sci-fi elements, collection of short stories, etc--but no specific titles.) 

"Do you...want some suggestions?" I asked, my voice as light as a feather, no pressure, certainly no fervent recommendations; no, just a casual question, so so so casual. I waited, doing something else, not even paying attention to her answer. Who cared about book suggestions? Not this mom, definitely not.

"Sure," she said. 

"Really?" I asked, not even daring to believe. She nodded. "YESSSS! FOLLOW ME TO THE LIBRARY!!!!!!" I screamed, all possible chill disappearing as I led her downstairs. 

I began pulling books from the shelves, babbling about how these books were going to change the way she saw the world, that they'd change her LIFE, that some of them are what made me a writer, and ISN'T IT AMAZING THAT OUR FAMILY HAS OUR OWN LIBRARY?! (this I exclaimed from the top of our library ladder). And ha ha, look at this, Daddy and I have three copies of My Antonia! She rolled her eyes but stuck around.

I am nowhere near finished building a collection of possible choices for her, and I'll need to buy a few, too (HOW DO I NOT HAVE A SHIRLEY JACKSON COLLECTION?!), and I'm remembering my own summers of late middle school / early high school when I read through every single Ray Bradbury book at the Fairport library, and wow. I guess I should have been a high school English teacher, maybe? Definitely not. What I can do, however, is offer good book recs to Lucia for her summer reading. More recs than she can ever read in one summer, or one school year. To my surprise, she didn't immediately reject every single book I pulled; in fact, she picked up The Handmaid's Tale as her first choice, and then asked about a German novel she'd heard about (outside the scope of the project at hand but oh, the satisfaction of being able to say "Sure, I have that," and then pulling it from the shelf!). 

Will my thoughtful and targeted book selections finally steer this child away from the trashy, thousand-page romantasy novels she favors? Perhaps, or maybe not yet, but that's fine. They'll all be here when she's ready for them. The stack will be steadily and reliably growing. (I don't like the overused word "curated," but I will be curating that stack as a daily practice.) We're approaching a moment when Lucia is going to read "The Lottery" for the first time, and that is a moment I anticipate with great excitement.