Day 362 (three to go)

My dear little god-daughter.

We travelled out west through swathes of snow, parking lots piled high with mountains of the stuff, fields deep and white, roads narrowed by plow-packed edges, icy lakes, rivers and roads reflecting the sun so brightly it hurt your eyes.

A visit to old friends whose daughter was visiting from South Africa.  It seemed as though we sat around a table all day eating and drinking and laughing at family stories, old and new, spanning the twenty-one years we have known them. 

There are two members of the next generation now, who were very sweet and well-behaved.

This little boy is very observant and perceptive for his age. 

There was a whole debate about pacifiers (dummies) and how old you should be when forced to give them up.  The final general consensus was that life is so hard as it is, why not let little children have them for going to sleep, until they are not babies anymore, because it doesn't stay for long, that simple security.  And after all, what are you teaching them by letting them scream and cry themselves to sleep?  Nothing good, I would venture.

And then the long drive home through the dark, with a stop-off at the bookstore for browsing, Chai Tea lattes and reading. 

What a lovely idea, to have a coffeeshop inside a bookstore, I love the luxury of it, drinking coffee or hot chocolate or smoothies in the summer, and going through the books you have chosen to explore.  So strange too, to think that it is a place where people are all sitting within a few feet of one another, but all with their eyes scanning the black lines of letters, all lost in different worlds, even Tim and I, sitting almost touching, but far apart, me in a graphic novel in which several people have interpreted the theme Flight.  Some just awful, some wonderful, so that occasionally I gasp at the beauty of the concept, the loveliness of the drawing.  Tim in his world of ... I was so wrapped up in my books that I can't even remember.

I have only three more days to go until the end of this running, writing, drawing resolution, and will have very mixed feelings about giving it all up, well, no, I'm not actually stopping the running or the drawing, but the whole doing of the blog, the making time for it, the discipline, the thoughts flitting about throughout the day, waiting to be plucked out of the air and put down on the page/computer screen, the creative pleasure of it, the idea of an audience, the delectable enjoyment of reading people's comments.

Flower study.