A Good Book on a Sunny Sunday

Recovering from my third cold in a year, I am thinking that perhaps there is a message amidst the gravelly voice and sneezes: Slow down.

I have little control of my Monday-Friday life, but weekends are mine. On this weekend, I rested and read, fully engaged in a coming-of-age novel set in Ireland and England. The Irish can tell a story.

Some books are so good - but sadly, only a small "some" - that they command you to set everything else aside for a weekend. You delve into them with such fervor and also with a sense of calm, too, for they "gentle" you and draw you into another place. You feel quite happy to be curled up with them, while the laundry waits and the dishes remain undone.

Having written for a living (though perhaps not well, I have had flashes of what I thought might be brilliance), I am picky in my reading material. It is a rare book that gives me a feeling of contentment.

When I find such a book, I am simply happy to read. Those times are rare, and therefore, memorable.

When I was in college, I house sat and cat sat for a professor in a charming little 1920s-era neighborhood not far from campus. One Easter Sunday when the professor was away for a conference, I started such an engrossing book in the morning, and read most of the day, pausing only for a late afternoon bus trip to the campus Catholic center for Mass. The sense of well-being stayed with me all day, and was as much a result of a good book as it was to the service, held at sunset with lambent light firing the sanctuary.

We celebrate food, we celebrate the seasons and nature and the goodness of friends and neighbors. Why not celebrate a good story well told?

The photo was taken along the shore near the east end of town. It has been mild and sunny here, and only the ice, a remnant of our freeze-and-thaw winter, is left.

Is this relief or merely false spring?