Hello friends,
Last week I went to my local bookstore to buy a couple of new releases. They had one (Amor Towles’ Table for Two), but had already sold out of the other (Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse). By the time I got home, the next shipment of that title had arrived. I received a text from the bookseller; he put my order into the hands of my friend, who popped in that afternoon; she then stopped by my house on her way home, placing the book into my waiting arms.
This made me want to cheer again for local bookstores! Save some of your book-buying budget for them.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: 9K
On the nine-thousandth day of our marriage, I pulled some weeds.
We have probably taken down over forty trees on our property. Today, for the first time, I planted one. And then I planted another.
When our son called with a broken-down car, I went to him and helped him push the car across the road to safety.
You wondered about long-term care for your parents and I talked to my sister.
There was a long, tiring email chain at work.
I shared a poem with my friends when we met at the wine bar.
We wondered about how the financial aid deadline would affect college reply dates.
I booked a hotel for that conference I forgot about and wrote some new, worse, versions of Taylor Swift lyrics for a laugh.
It was an ordinary day, one of nine thousand we’ve lived; unexpected, yet expected–in that you’ve tracked these days on a spreadsheet like the person you are, like the person you have always been.
So much of our conversation these days centers around money and health (How is everyone feeling? How will we pay for this and that?). It is a mercy that we have had money and health for all of these nine thousand days. We will find time to bicker about what the other is eating and how the other is feeling for days to come, Lord willing.
Nine thousand days are made up of one day after another. One day of weeding and another day of planting; more often each day contains a little bit of both.
For the Anglophiles
Here’s a story of a unique building design, made with the church next door in mind: “The church had always been overlooked, tucked down the side street next to the railway viaduct, so we wanted to celebrate it and draw people’s attention to it.”
Reads & Listens of the Week
I was encouraged by this piece from
: The Frustration of Incremental Progress. “A good life is a long-term project, and I suppose taking things incrementally means we’ll stop and start many times.”I saw myself here, with my CD collection happily taking up space in my attic: “One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs” Physical media forever!
Here’s a story about one of the last drivers to cross the Key Bridge in Baltimore before it collapsed.
Growing up outside of Boston, I was privileged to see this man conduct more than once: John Williams Faces His Legacy. “…I went about it not to try to compete with Igor Stravinsky or the great classical composers, but to learn from the process of doing — the best school of all.”
We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening. -GK Chesterton
Dogwoods are my favorite. Congratulations on 9k days ; ) and thank you for sharing my post. (By chance is the conference you mentioned the CS Lewis conference?!)