Life - grace grits and gardening

For Taylor

October 4, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

Taylor Sandquist, my beautiful, twelve-year-old niece, wrote the following poem for her English class.

Where Poetry Hides

In my fat, black and white cat’s crazy, teeny tiny

brain.

In the small #1 cabin on a lake in Arkansas.

In a nice, pretty resort in San Diego.

In my strange brother’s mind, who acts like a

crazy monkey.

In my pink Dell laptop.

In my nonie’s old, torn-up house.

In my dad’s clean, neat house.

In my oval/heart-shaped pool.

In the twisty, hilly and dirty campground of

Wyoming.

In the old basement of my other grandparents’

house.

Taylor Sandquist

Musical Pairing:

What Makes You Beautiful, One Direction

Taylor and Talya at the BAT cave.

Sammie

A friend recently asked what would happen if everyone now reading Fifty Shades of Grey read 90 Minutes in Heaven instead? I think he was annoyed that anyone would devote any time to anything unrelated to religion.

Interesting.

What if people who refuse to read one over the other, read both? Or if those who never read at all read something? Just read. A paragraph, the comics, a children’s book, a blog post…

Diversity stretches our minds, makes us think through the cobwebs.

Books are great companions, some better friends than other. They find a way into our lives, drawing us in, teaching, helping us learn, unlearn, think, re-think. If we never grow and change, nothing changes. Or maybe a book reinforces what we already believe.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. (Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood)

People who read a thousand books, live a thousand lives within the pages, connecting with the characters in the stories, the authors who formed the words, the other readers – those who suggested it, those who read it a hundred years ago.

Certain books I read over and over, leaving a part of myself between the pages each time, taking something new with me at the end, a feeling, a thought, a memory. Years later, re-reading it, I find myself again, a younger person but the same person, familiar but with broadened horizons. Maybe I see it in a totally new light because I’m a different me.

Reading only one book, one genre, having one idea, one life is limiting. Never feeling the exhaustion of the Old Man fighting the marlin, never drinking a mug of butterbeer or eating a pumpkin pastie, never hearing the choiring of the trees…

Never being sprinkled with pixie dust or reviving a secret garden or swinging through a jungle… Never journeying to Middle Earth or colonizing Mars….

Oh the places you’ll go!

Books are magical.

Even the different ones.

They make you think.

talya

Grace Grits and Gardening
Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Musical Pairing:

Narnia, Steve Hackett

“Think and wonder, wonder and think.”

― Dr. Seuss

Miss Suzy

September 28, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

For six months a squirrel made her home in our eaves, gaining access up the crepe myrtle ladder and through a rotted board. I named her Miss Suzy.

As Lucy and Annabelle pulled me down the driveway for our daily walks, Miss Suzy often poked her head through the hole watching us from above. Sometimes she spit bits of pink insulation down on us, chattering and yammering, clearly upset we were disturbing her nap. Or trespassing near her stash of nuts.

Finally, we replaced the wood, evicting her before she moved into the spare bedroom.

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite books was Miss Suzy by Miriam Young and Arnold Lobel. If you aren’t familiar with it, Miss Suzy was a gray squirrel who lived in the tip, tip, top of a tall oak tree. She liked to cook, she liked to clean, and she liked to sing while she worked….

Her life was fantastic until a band of six red squirrels took over her home, chasing her away. On a stormy night, she moved into the attic of an old house, into a beautiful dollhouse no longer enjoyed as the little girl had grown up and moved away. To Washington DC… (my words).

My mother read this book to me over and over and over every day. I can recite the words today. And, of course, I still have my copy of Miss Suzy (first edition, copyright 1964, Parents’ Magazine Press.) The pictures are art, the pages heavy and matte, significant.

I’m not sure where Texas Miss Suzy is living now – maybe back in the tip, tip, top of a tall live oak tree with her firefly lamps and acorn cups, where she belongs. But I know where she likes to spend her afternoons – in our backyard, her new home base for nut gathering. We catch her digging holes in the potted plants, the plants that have barely survived the summer. She jumps from the trees onto the fence, and runs along beside the swimming pool. Lucy and Annabelle are on full alert.

Miss Suzy is fat and very busy. Maybe Texas will actually have a winter this year.

talya

Musical Pairings:

Don’t Forget to Remember Me, Carrie Underwood

…she could see a million stars, the wind blew gently and rocked the tree like a cradle…Miss Suzy was very happy once more.