Pleasant Fifty-Year-Old Female

Spring is upon us at last! I write from the chair next to the window in my second story office from which I can see the apple tree beginning to blossom. In the side yard near my garden is a subspecies of apple that is not crab apple but blooms hot pink like a crab apple. It’s pretty much in full bloom now, which makes my heart sing.

While the yard and all of town is beset by starlings’ ugly cries, I happen to know that in the country and the canyons and out by the pond, the songbirds are in full force. I’ve seen the Western Tanager in my yard. I’ve seen yellow warblers, pied-billed grebes and cinnamon teals. Still my favorite is the Spotted Towhee, who has red-rimmed eyes. He can be found in a canyon pine singing so earnestly that his black body and spotted orange breast shudder with effort, producing a joyful five-beat melody.

After a mostly sedentary winter recovering from the shock and heartbreak of my brother’s absence, I went a little nuts in April. I walked five miles a day for over three weeks straight. I played racquetball with my husband for a solid hour with only two breaks. I hurt myself. I over-taxed a tendon that grounded me for most of May. When I recently had it looked at, the doctor (well, PA; you can’t get in to see a doc anymore) said it looked like overuse. I explained that if I can’t hike my mental health suffers. He gave that nod that says, Gee, that sucks for you.

“So what do I do?” I asked.  He replied, “Well, your hips are weak, your quads are weak, and your hamstrings are weak. Let’s get you into a physical therapy.”

I’m sorry to report that I can no longer do sedentary-to-active in a month. I get it. But can’t I just get walking and strengthen my legs? Get strong by moving? I actually asked him this question, leaving myself open to his pithy response:

You can when you’re twenty.

Minutes later, as I was being scheduled for PT, I heard him speaking into his little dictaphone: “Pleasant fifty-year-old female came to see me for left back-of-knee pain….” He was so close to me, I was obviously going to overhear this. He used that descriptive as a joke, surely, and I laughed. But he didn’t make eye contact. Neither did the assistant in front of me, doing the scheduling. Ok. Okie Dokie.

Reading Round-up

Grief is the Thing With Feathers, by Max Porter. Did I already talk about this title? I read it in April, after I put out a call to Facebook friends. I asked for the last three books people remembered as outstanding. I got a terrific list (posted below). My mentor from grad school at Wyoming, Alyson Hagy, recommended this one. It’s not a regular novel, and it’s not a typical subject: a family suffers the loss of wife/mother and is visited by a crow intent on helping them grieve. The bereaved father happens to be a Ted Hughes scholar; the novel’s poetic form pays homage to Hughes’ work. I loved it for its exploration of grief, the way it was heartbreaking and funny. Yes, I said funny.

Dog Medicine, Julie Barton. I found this one while listening to the Dear Sugar podcast. Barton was a call-in expert on an episode dealing with pets. Sugar, Cheryl Strayed, loves animals and credits them with saving her life more than once. Barton’s memoir tells the story of her first major depressive episode in her twenties. The adoption of a dog saved her life. I loved Barton’s unabashed placement of our canine friends as life saviors. Especially interesting was the book’s trickiness with language. The prose is tidy and precise, which felt all wrong for the author’s subject matter: an abusive brother, negligent parents, careless sexual encounters with undeserving men  and the effects of all the above on an exquisitely sensitive soul. How bizarre it was to explore such subjects through carefully crafted, neatly edited, reporter-like prose.

The Ploughman by Kim Zupan. In an unnamed Montana town, an unlikely friendship develops between an aged serial killer and the young deputy sheriff tasked with monitoring him at the jailhouse. In tone and language the novel is very like Cormac McCarthy. I dog-eared pages that held words I’d never seen. The list was up to fifty by the time I finished and I’m not done compiling them.

Home Everywhere, by Megan McNamer. A group of travelers meets on a tour of Asia. The novel follows them from their first flight through their travels in a foreign place. The differences among this cast of characters drives the plot, especially in how they feel about being away from home. Why do some people find it easier than others to be at home everywhere, while others struggle endlessly with a sense of belonging? McNamer is a Missoula writer. We are working on a shared literary event in Bozeman this summer. Details to come.

On my bedside table:

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders; Leading Men, Christopher Castellani; The Friend, Sigrid Nunez

Facebook Reading List: wowsa!!!!

Mischling, Affinity Konar

Circe, Madeline Miller

Scribe, Alyson Hagy

Red Clocks, Leni Zumas

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett

The House of Broken Angels, Luis Urrea

Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles

The Guest Cat, Takashi Hiraide

Everything Here is Beautiful, Mira T. Lee

Clock Dance, Anne Tyler

Severance, Ling Ma

Someday We Will fly, Rachel DeWoskin

Widow Nash, Jamie Harrison

The Japanese Lover, Isabel Allende

The Third Wife, Lisa Jewell

Baltimore Book of Dead, Marion Winik

Greif is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter

There There, Tommy Orange

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

The Wolf Tone, Christy Stillwell (!)

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

Blindness, Jose Saramago

The Dog Stars, Peter Heller

Peace like a River, Lief Enger

Hearts of Horses, Molly Gloss

Unsheltered, Barbara. Kingsolver

A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin

What I Loved, Siri Hustvedt