July Book Club Meeting

The Bookmarkers will meet here on July 13th, so I've got to get myself busy shining up the place. Our reading selection is Ahab's Wife by Alabamian Sena Jeter Naslund, probably the best novel I've read in recent years.

At the far edge of my back yard, there's a sort of staggered double row of big oak and pine trees, with ten to twenty feet of open space between the two rows, the full length of the two lots (see above). I call it the alee, or the avenue. Since the Atchisons cleaned out and leveled the adjoining Ditch, it's the most pleasant place to walk, or to loaf and invite the soul. I wish we could have the meeting out there, but of course in July that's impossible. But one day recently, I was standing at the east end of the avenue, looking down it to the west end, and had a vision of a row of flowering shrubbery, like Alabama (white) azaleas, between the trees on the side closer to the house, with an arched trellis for the already established rose bushes to climb on. Steve could still get in there to mow and weed, from either end of the rows. The picture at right was made before all the landscaping and before the trees added another five years of growth.

Drifting and dreaming, but it's do-able. I could spend the next ten years doing it myself, or get the Atchisons or that Schmith from Pelham to do it in a few days, once they ever got started. Of course, it would cost another fortune, and I'd probably have to get a job to pay for it.