Your Daily Miracle: Wintergatan

Just returned from a walk/run with Charley through the most intoxicating springtime air.  After days of rain the sun felt warm and friendly.  Only one yard has a meager showing of bright red tulip blooms but daffodils abound (spelled that flower correctly on the second try that time--improvement!), the fruit trees are frilly, and the heather a deep pinkish-purple.  It truly is a magnificent day, one where you want to be outside as one hour slips into another, as the sun rises higher in the sky.

However, I will probably once again cloister myself in the library, hopefully at my favorite table across from the nonfiction isle, where I can look up from my computer to browse spines of books on every conceivable subject, including one huge, hard-backed tome dedicated solely to FLAX.  Now, I love flax and even have some growing in my garden, but I cannot imagine wiling away the evening hours reading hundreds of pages about it.  But everyone has to have a passion, and for one person at least, FLAX was it.  The book has never moved from its position since I have been working at the library, so perhaps that is indicative that it is a very specific passion for very specific people.  I will let you know of developments in local interest in this particular subject as I keep track of the book. :)

I almost hate to tell you what I am doing in the library, but I am a humble person and so I will.  I have returned like the proverbial dog to the proverbial upchuck and I am back at work revising Maple.  There.  Perhaps it would have been wisest of me to just discard that book as a lost cause, since I've been working on drafts of it intermittently since Merry was a toddler.  I could have spent all that energy just writing a new book, and honestly I'm not sure why I haven't.  Perhaps it's because Maple, her crazy dad, Abuela, Yin, Yang, Jose, and Muncy Street have become a sort of home-away-from-home for me over the years.  I have to make myself care about the plot (which has probably changed half a dozen or more times), because really I like just hanging out on Muncy Street for some hours out of every year.

And in my defense, people have done crazier, more wonderful things than work on the same book for ten years.  I mean, just check out this guy and his magnificent musical marble machine.  He spent a year constructing it for no other reason that he had a vision for this marvel--and brought this magic into reality.  I hope that the old adage is true about good things being born during hours of what others might perceive as frivolity, and that being a writer, or an artist, or a musician, is about doing what is absolutely ridiculous in the harsh, glaring light of societal productivity but oh, so, deeply worthwhile: