Little Tree

The Education of Little Tree is a rather short little novel--if it is a novel. Apropos of something this morning, I got the book down to see how many words are in it (rough count 77,000). Not as short as a standard Harlequin-type romance, probably a good deal longer than The Old Man and the Sea.

Anyway, I had read all the front information, the table of contents, and the first 16 pages, before I stopped and remembered why I opened the book. Something takes hold of you when you start reading that book, something like walking barefoot up the side of a mountain, on a hard-packed dirt trail embedded with little smooth white quartz stones. Maybe up ahead there's a stray hound, starved and mangey-looking, pausing and wagging his tail so you'll think he's somebody you know and will take him home, and you give him the dime-pack of peanut butter crackers you bought coming through town and only ate one of and were saving the other four to eat when you got to the top of the mountain. This makes me put my hands over my face and cry, and remember when I lived on the mountain, the times when I would sit at the top of the tram track, and would cover my face with my hands and cry because the mountain was all I had, and think of the time when I would be grown and maybe old and would remember being on the mountain and would cover my face and cry because it was gone.

Time gets mixed up. Especially when you've been sick.

2:45 p.m. I just ate a large bowlful of extremely delicious vegetable soup, with a handful of rice thrown in for weight, and cornbread. While occupied with soup, I failed to notice the temperature rising up to about 75 degrees, higher than that in the house, and now I'm too hot, but feeling fed and sassy. I've taken so much antibiotics, steroids and asthma medicine, I feel ten or nine times better than I did yesterday. Remind me never to hate a doctor again.

Anyway, The Ed. of Little Tree has over 75,000 words, and The OM&theS less than 35,000. I wonder how long it took Hemingway to write that little book.

On the doctor's scale the other day, I was 10 pounds lighter than the last time I trod thereon. Guess I lost it trudging up and down the stairs about a thousand times. Think I'll do it again this week and see what happens. The skin on my arms looks like old worn crepe that has been washed but not ironed. "Vanity, vanity! All is vanity, saith the Preacher."