Framed-art tour, exhibit 12

We return, here, to our series I’ve long neglected. Nothing since last October—no mention of what’s on the walls. You’d think I’m always looking out windows, taking in the sights, spying bears and snakes and things, but no. Walls are opportunities. 

The piece is easy to miss, hanging as it does between two shelves of our rickety bookcase upstairs. Plus the room it’s in doesn’t get slept in a lot. Mostly nobody’s even up there. If they are, the person has to be wanting a book, looking for a book. Otherwise they won’t hit on my sign. And then they’re maybe just having an insomnia attack and aren’t much interested in taking out a library loan. Conversely, should they actually help themselves, they might forget about returning the book until some faraway day when my husband and I are both dead, in which case somebody else would be living in our house. The new people would’ve disposed of our junker furniture and books and would have no interest in some book they didn’t get to pitch. The person would be too embarrassed to actually contact a relative of the deceased and admit to what might get interpreted as theft. Or the person’s sheer grief might prevent them from intentionally meeting up, because then they’d find themself reminiscing about the departed. They’d be reopening the floodgates.

You can see the problem.

 

 

But here’s a deal. We, in fact, possess two—2, plural—copies of Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days. So somebody pulling from the shelf the extra one can keep it forever.

Lois is who put me onto the book. She was down at Duke with Bill who was having a procedure. All these patients coming and going, she wrote, but the first chapter is SO good, I became absorbed in it!!! Read it, if you haven’t.

Shortly, I was thick into a library copy. I bought our two because I knew I’d want to foist the book on everybody I loved. I’m foisting it on you. Patchett’s essays are exquisite. She’s great at novels, too, but Precious Days is something else. “It’s essential to the life of a novel,” she writes, “to come upon the turn you never saw coming.” I so don’t want you to miss the turns she pulls on her readers, here, in her amazing pink whopper of a collection.

P.S. Yes, this upstairs bookshelf, too, is bolted to the wall. My husband wasn’t taking any chances.