Echoes in my heart

on loving my life, books and other things

That’s my sweetheart, sitting in his usual spot for our Sunday morning writing dates. We have been doing this for a very long time. Now and then we have other things happening, but usually you can find us in one of a few spots around Buffalo enjoying the local coffee and breakfast treats and writing away on our laptops or, for me, in a notebook. I sit on that bench across from him, under the photos of our fair city. This particular place is especially loved as it’s also a bookshop, and it’s in one of our favourite city neighbourhoods. I look forward to these mornings and in my heart hope they never end, even though my heart knows that nothing is forever.

That has been on my mind a lot lately, how nothing is forever. How sometimes I stop in my tracks, full of a feeling of wonder from my toes to the crown of my head, so grateful for the very ordinary, humble life I have with all of it’s ups and downs, triumphs and failures, and truly feeling the immense beauty of the ephemeral moment. The ordinary moments of day that never fail to amaze me in their extraordinary and aching beauty. This morning when my sweetheart walked into the kitchen after waking and my glance met him, my whole heart ached with love for him and his mussed up hair and the way he was walking just a bit differently because his back has been hurting—and why wouldn’t it be hurting after a week of snowblowing and shoveling and filling his bird feeders and taking care of our land in three feet of fresh snow? Maybe it’s because I waited my whole life to love someone how I love him, but these moments do not ever escape my awe-struck attention that I could be so damn lucky. The gratitude is ever present. How someone’s utter humanness and essential goodness can bring my heart to its knees. That might be getting too sentimental, but who cares. Life requires celebrating these vulnerable truths to be worth living. Otherwise it’s just too damn hard to live wide-eyed in a world so full of suffering and at the same time so overflowing with beauty.

It can really help when we try live in a constant state of wonder and awe and gratitude. Even when I feel like shit and my brain is muddled with discouraging thoughts and realities—I can wake up, make a cup of coffee, turn on some fairy lights from the Dollar Store, light a candle, sink into my treasured old reading chair that once belonged to Rick’s father, and feel joy amidst any other feeling I might be feeling. And you know what? That is what gratitude feels like. At least for me. My life is pretty easy sitting in my warm house with a fridge full of food, and I never want to forget that, even when the odds do not feel in my favour.

I am rambling now, so I will try to be more on point, but now and then I just want to sit down and type these things out.

I’ve been reading a lot of fiction lately, and that always makes me think more and want to write more, and the book I just finished has been quite the experience. It has me swinging on the pendulum of emotions and thoughts all over the place. It’s a tiny book, but it contains a big story and requires slow reading. It has 135 pages, but it has taken me all week to complete it. The last book I read was almost five hundred pages and it also took me a week; this says so much, I think. It is rare that a book so completely enters into my emotional realm where I feel every single sentence like I am stepping into a shimmering pool, where the water mirrors my own soul. Each ripple draws me in deeper and I cannot tell where the story ends and I begin. Do you know that feeling? I’m telling you it is rare. It is especially rare for a book of only 135 pages. What is this luminous little book? So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. It is one of the most profound reading experiences I have ever had. I think the last book that even came close was Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. (If you have read either of these, I want to hear from you below in the comments.)

Where to go from a book like this? I have Rosamunde Pilcher’s Winter Solstice waiting for me, a big sprawling and cosy novel that I have read a few times already, and know that I love, but I’m a bit worried about the transition. Maybe I should take a few days and just knit when I would normally read, clean the palette a bit. As heartbreaking as Maxwell’s world is, I am not quite ready to leave it. Wow, I get that crackling feeling in my throat like I might cry when I even think about it. I wonder if others have had the same reaction to this book. I wonder.

And now I am going to work on my own book while I have this precious time to just be a writer, sitting here across from this man, truly a writer, whom I love so dearly, on a wintry Sunday morning with a view of a small corner of the diamond in the rough and tumble humble city we both adore. I hope you have a day where wonder and awe strike you many many times. It’s all around us, anywhere we are. Find a bit, and let me know what you discover, in the comments below.

Much love. And thanks so much for being here.