a good book

I was already stretched out on the futon, Spike at my side and Adia at my feet, with a fluffy blanket covering us, when the snow started. It must have been a slow moving storm as yesterday the forecast called for it to start before noon… and it was just before 3pm when it arrived. Not that we are sorry for the delay!

I finished a piece of literary fluff earlier in the afternoon and after a break picked up ‘Portrait of a Marriage’ by Pearl S. Buck. I was hooked on the first sentence.

The June landscape of Pennsylvania was full of pictures.

I lapped up the second paragraph, reading it over and over to myself, wishing that I could express myself so well. 

He looked at the richness about him and asked himself if it were perhaps too rich and the beauty too lush for a canvas. Did the plenteousness also contain a monotony?

The story is interesting, but to be honest, I spend more time luxuriating in the prose than paying attention to the action. This kind of focused attention wears out my brain faster than can be imagined, so it is a slow progress, but oh so satisfying!

Adia and I have been working on ‘mat’ and stay today - with a few small failures, she’ll stay on a mat in the middle of the room while I go into the kitchen and put a little kibble in her bowl. I can even open the front door now (not with company coming in yet though). She does get a bit confused and offers a few other behaviours if we are too far away from the mat, but the send distance is getting further.

It was too much to ask her to stay when Carm was bustling about getting Grace’s food while I got her food out of the bin in the other room. No, she was distracted and anxious to get her broccoli treat and then her supper, so I settled for a quick sit and left it for tomorrow.

Later in the evening, the snow swirled against my back as I hunched in the storm waiting for Adia to ‘go’. If I had stayed out much longer, clothed only in pajama bottoms and a flannel shirt (my beloved flannel shirt), the snow would have started accumulating on my shoulders, and as it was when I went inside I had to shake vigorously and rub the towel briskly over my hair. The exhilaration of being in the elements contrasted nicely with my comfortable spot on the sofa under a down blanket.

“In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.”

~Ben Aaronovitch