These are old secrets. They will come out like wisdom teeth when the time is right.

White Teeth  by Zadie Smith
First published in 2000

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
White Teeth is an intergenerational exploration of family, roots, morality, and friendship. We've got two main characters at the beginning, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. They're older gents, Brits (one Bengali by birth), and they're best friends. We flash around in time (much of the meat of the book is in the 70s and 80s) and eventually find out they fought in WWII together (though fought is perhaps too strong a word for their involvement). When things kick off, Archie is in a bad way (read: mid-suicide attempt) after a nasty divorce, but he randomly bumps into a woman several decades junior to him, Clara, who is a Brit with Jamaican roots, and they end up dating and then quickly married. Clara was escaping the Jehovah's Witness-ness of her family life, and they end up having a daughter, Irie (yes, as in, 'everyting going be irie'). 

Samad marries a woman named Alsana, and they have twin sons, Magid and Millat. Through a strange course of events, Samad ends up deciding that he must send at least one of his sons back to Bangladesh. This in and of itself is not perhaps that strange - he doesn't like the effect of Britain on his children - but what is strange is he decides to send only one (to be fair, he can only afford one) and that he sends him alone. I thought he was going to go with one of his sons, but he stays in Britain with their mother, who proceeds to continue living with him but from that point on basically never forgives him (like you would if your husband sent one of your twin sons away in the night without asking you first). 

Irie, Magid, and Millat are friends, or at least, they are until Magid gets sent to Bangladesh. Another family, the Chalfens, end up sort of pseudo-adopting Millat and Irie for a time, and there's a whole business with the father of that family who is trying to genetically modify a mouse. Things get complicated, Millat turns into both a bad boy and a fundamentalist Muslim, Magid ends up coming back to Britain because he and Mr. Chalfen get on like gangbusters, and then Irie eventually sleeps with both Magid and Millat (again, for complicated reasons) and gets pregnant. Since the acts happened extremely close together, she realizes she will never be able to tell which of the twins is the father, and she is just kind of beginning to unpack this when the book reaches its climax. 

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Okay, well if you've read White Teeth, then presumably you know that I left a fair bit out of the plot summary. But then again, if you've read White Teeth, then you probably also know that it's not really a plot-driven novel. At least, I wouldn't call it one. I wouldn't say it's the least plot-driven novel I've read, but it's definitely closer to the non-plot-driven end of the spectrum. If you know me, then you know that I'm generally a plot-loving kind of gal. I mean, I love me a beautiful sentence as much as the next reader, but I'm gonna need you to give me just a teeensy bit of plot to work with. And while many things happened (many of which you just read about), they weren't driving the book, so I feel pretty certain that if I wasn't reading this for my blob, I probably would have set it down and walked away. 

This is the first Zadie Smith work I've read, and while there were things I did like about it a lot (love the depth of characters, the nuanced representation of a diverse group, the impeccably written dialogue) I cannot say on the whole that I came out loving it. I don't think I would ever want to read it again, and I am, honestly, a little surprised that it was a bestseller. But these are just my two cents, and I would very much like to read more Zadie Smith to see what the rest of her work is like. Here are the rest of my thoughts (and some of the bits I did like), in no real order:

On headstands, compulsory or otherwise
There are some fantastic scenes about Samad's clashing with the Western educational system, particularly before the splitting of the twins. This was one of my favorites, from a school meeting about investing in a playground remodel.

13.2 Mr. Iqbal wishes to know why the Western education system privileges activity of the body over activity of the mind and soul.
13.3 The Chairwoman wonders if this is quite relevant.
13.4 Mr. Iqbal demands the vote be delayed until he can present a paper detailing the main arguments and emphasizes that his sons, Magid and Millat, get all the exercise they need via headstands that strengthen the muscles and send blood to stimulate the somatosensory cortex in the brain.
13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands.
13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable. lololol. Not that I'm here for body-shaming, but I love the idea of a headstand regime. 

On Ms. versus Mrs. versus Miss
Here's another exchange between Samad and one of the school moms, who has recently gotten divorced and wants to be addressed as a 'Ms.': 

"Mzzz?"
"Ms."
"And this is some kind of linguistic conflation between the words Mrs. and Miss?" asked Samad, genuinely curious and oblivious to the nether wobblings of Katie Miniver's bottom lip. "Something to describe the woman who has either lost her husband or has no prospect of finding another?" Again, I can so sympathize with the wobbly-lipped Katie, but I also just love the bluntness of his line of questioning. 

On certainty
After Samad steals Magid in the night and puts him on a one-way trip to Bangladesh, his wife Alsana stops allowing him any certainty in her responses. This is beautifully articulated in the book, and has to do with her revenge for taking away her certainty in knowing where one of her children was and how he was doing and if he was safe at any given time in the day. Here are some of their exchanges:

Samad: "What time is it?"
Alsana: "It could be three, Samad Miah, but Allah knows it could also be four."
Samad: "Alsana, where have you put the remote control?"
Alsana: "It is as likely to be in the drawer, Samad Miah, as it is behind the sofa." lololloololz. I'm totally going to try this on someone. Meredith, is it time for lunch? It could be, and it could also not be. Meredith, where is that scarf I lent you last week? It is as likely to be in my closet as it is to be in my car. 

On admitting illness
Hortense is Clara's mom, and so also Irie's grandmother, and Irie ends up running from Clara and Archie to live with Hortense. Hortense is, as I mentioned in the plot summary, a devout Jehovah's Witness, and is constantly awaiting the end of the world (more on that in a moment). Here are some Hortense-isms that I loved. 

It was important, in Hortense's presence, never to admit to illness. The cure, as in most Jamaican households was always more painful than the symptoms. At one point she throws rum at Irie's face (I think it's to stave off a fever?) and Irie's like, Ack! What are you Doing!? It reminded me of two things - (1) That my grandmother did not tolerate illness - she'd hear you sneeze and go, "Oh! Do you have a COLD?!" Which mostly just cracked me up, but also made me secretive about my sneezes around her, and (2) That time when I was studying abroad in France and my host family went away and my host grandparents came to stay and they found out I wasn't feeling well and they gave me a Large fizzy pill from a pile of unmarked pills in a drawer and said (in French) "drink this and you'll feel better!" and I felt a little like Alice in Wonderland but I did and then I felt better the next day but they had left so I couldn't ask them what was in the magic fizzy pill or where to buy more of them. The French are very into effervescent medicine. Or at least, they were when I was there. 

When Irie says she's hungry so she'll just eat an orange: Dat's not a real orange, dear. All de fruit is plasticated. De flowers are plasticated also. I don't believe de Lord meant me to spend de little housekeeping money I possess on perishable goods. Have some dates. ahghagahghaghahgaghg. I love this so much. 

On the end of the world
Okay, so as I mentioned, Hortense is anxiously awaiting the Judgment Day, or what some might call the end of the world. Here's how Irie describes moving in with Hortense:

[Irie] was intrigued by the Bowden household. It was a place of endgames and aftertimes, fullstops and finales; where to count on the arrival of tomorrow was an indulgence, and every service in the house, from the milkman to the electricity, was paid for on a strictly daily basis so as not to spend money on utilities or goods that would be wasted should God turn up in all his holy vengeance the very next day.

I loved this description and I also loved that it reminded me of one of my new favorite reads, The Sundial, by Shirley Jackson. It's also kind of about the end of the world, and it's trippy and witty and sarcastic and delightful. I highly recommend it. 

On England, a borrowed homeland
One of the other things Zadie Smith does beautifully (okay, so I realize I'm praising a lot here but I said I didn't love the book; I guess I loved a lot of parts of it but didn't end up loving the whole? Does that make sense?) is articulate the immigrant experience (or several examples of the immigrant experience, which speak to themes among immigrant experiences). Here's how Samad describes relocating to Britain:

Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. 

Since America is where I was born to begin with, I can't imagine what it would be like to call another country, or another continent, home. I'm sure it comes with such complexities of emotion and belonging and longing, and I thought Zadie Smith did a stunning job writing those complexities.

Referents and Reverberations
Alsana reads Rabindranath Tagore at one point, and I enjoyed it because I had actually also read Rabindranath Tagore. If you missed that blob post, he's a Nobel laureate and a Bengali poet. 

And of course, I have to call out the shout-out to my boy Marcel, since you know how much I love him:

Irie, in her late teen years - Despite opting for a life of dentistry, she had not yet lost all of the poetry in her soul, that is, she could still have the odd Proustian moment, note layers upon layers, though she often experienced them in periodontal terms. 

This line continues into an exquisite series of metaphors, all tooth-related. I must admit that while I'm sure there's a clear logic to it, I couldn't quite lay my fingers on all the teeth analogies and connections in this book. I felt like my brain just couldn't quite make its way all the way there, which left me feeling a little unsatisfied. Which is probably more my fault than Zadie Smith's - I'm sure her metaphors make sense to her!

Lines I Liked:

• No one told Archie that lurking in the Diagilo family tree were two hysteric aunts, an uncle who talked to eggplants, and a cousin who wore his clothes back to front. 

• You have picked up the wrong life in the cloakroom and you must return it. God, I love this line.

• "Millat, where are Magid and Irie?" "Coming." "Coming with the speed of a train or coming with the speed of a snail?" Again, totally stealing this. 

• On re-ringing the doorbell: And then the slow process of disappearance began to rewind as Mr. J.P. Hamilton reconstituted himself via the atoms of a staircase and a dresser until he was large as life once more, curled around the door. Probably my favorite image in the book.

• Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

• Maybe nothing that happens on stolen ground can expect a happy ending.

Words that were new to me:



ouroboros - a circular symbol depicting a snake, or less commonly a dragon, swallowing its tail, as an emblem of wholeness or infinity

trilby - a soft felt hat with a narrow brim and indented crown

Well, blobbists, I think that's a wrap! I'm off to tackle The Soothsayer, or something of that ilk. Keep each other safe, keep faith, and good night. 

They were a curious family, a law to themselves, separate from the world, isolated, a small republic set in invisible bounds.

The Rainbow  by D. H. Lawrence
First published in 1915

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
The Rainbow is a multigenerational story about the Brangwen family, who live in the English countryside in the early 1900s. We start of with Tom Brangwen, the youngest of his clan, who marries Lydia, a Polish immigrant who has come to live in their small town with her daughter, Anna, after her husband dies. Tom and Lydia have two sons, Fred and Tom, and Anna marries her cousin, Will Brangwen, and they proceed to have a whole mess of children - Ursula, Gudrun, Theresa, Catherine, Billy, and Cassandra. Mostly we follow the love affairs of the various generations, which are full of existential ups and downs (and are generally a bit too roller-coaster-y for my taste), and occasionally something else happens. Ursula has a brief but passionate love affair with her school teacher, Winifred, and then several other dalliances with men, but ends up sort of happily alone at the end of the novel.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Well, dear blobbists, I did not like this book. As you will see from my comments, I found the family name to be challenging (Brangwen) and honestly, very little happened over the course of the book, which I have a hard time with. I'm not a "plot or bust" kind of reader, but I would love for Something to take place over the course of your 459 pages. 

I've taken a brief dive into the history of this work, and it seems that it was banned in Britain (and many copies were burned) because of its 'frank treatment of sexual desire' for about a decade (1915-1926) after an 'obscenity' trial. It's interesting, because it seems that he was much maligned for his more overt, sexual writing, and I have to admit that that's the only part I really liked! I honestly finished the book and thought, man, this guy should have written romance novels, or maybe even erotica. Maybe the world just wasn't ready for him! In any case, I could very much take or leave hte rest of the novel. But here are the rest of my thoughts: 

Brangwen (mouthful, Too many Brangwens)
This name was such a mouthful to work through in my head each time. I kept wanting the G not to be there, or for it to be Braggen or Brannon or something, but it just felt clumsy in my brain, which made the fact that we were spending Multiple Generations with the Brangwens rather frustrating. Also, Anna marries her cousin, Will, and while they're technically not blood related, because Anna was Lydia's daughter from a previous marriage, it's still a Leeetle too close for comfort. Her dad makes a joke as they're signing the wedding certificate that there are "too many Brangwens" on the paper, and I was like, is that #incesthumor? #notmytaste 

Don't judge a book by its ERRONEOUS cover
My copy of this book has a ridiculous cover, a painting of a baby with a blanket with white and rainbow stripes. I would like to create a formal complaints board for book covers that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the actual content of the book, or the meaning of the title. Seriously - the rainbow is an actual rainbow here, folks. It's getting at a bigger metaphor, but it would be SO easy to just put a painting of a Rainbow in the sky. There must be hundreds of those. Thousands, even. Am I the only one that is bothered by things like this? Feel free to join my board if it bothers you, too. 

Woman as pseudo-protagonist
I thought it was interesting that while there were several male characters who sort of seemed like the main character, most of the people we followed closely were women. This felt kind of revolutionary for a male writer from the early 1900s. On the whole, it felt like he wrote women well, but I couldn't really understand why we was writing from their perspective. 

Man as father
I think it's fascinating how when we're growing up, we use one item or one person to represent a whole world of items. This line of Anna's, on Tom Brangwen: 

The only man she knew was her father; and, as he was something large, looming, a kind of Godhead, he embraced all manhood for her, and other men were just incidental.

Reminded me of how my sister said that she was so confused the first time she met a mom who was petite, and short, and generally a small person. She was so used to our mom, who's 5'11, that she couldn't process the idea of a mom that didn't fit that image. I like the idea that we all go around making up images and definitions of concepts and ideas, and life slowly deconstructs and reconstructs them as we age. 

Organ playing
Ursula goes to the church with her father, Will, while he practices the organ, and it reminded me of going to church and listening while my mom practiced the organ. At one point, she also plays a little too vigorously and leaves a mess, so they aren't allowed to come back for a while, which I found quite amusing. 

Referents and Reverberations

On drinking
This scene of Tom Brangwen (the first Tom Brangwen, of several) drinking:

He was by nature temperate. Being sensitive and emotional, his nausea prevented him from drinking too much. But, in futile anger, with the greatest of determination and apparent good-humour, he began to drink in order to get drunk. 

 He had an idea that everybody in the room was a man after his own heart, that everything was glorious, everything was perfect. When somebody in alarm told him his coat pocket was on fire, he could only beam from a red, blissful face and say "Iss-all-ri-ight - iss-a'-ri-ight - its' a' right - let it be, let it be-" and he laughed with pleasure, and was rather indignant that the others should think it unnatural for his coat pocket to burn: -it was the happiest and most natural thing in the world - what?

Reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from David Copperfield, when Davy first gets drunk:

Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as 'Copperfield,' and saying, 'Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn't do it.' Now, somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair - only my hair, nothing else - looked drunk.

On growing up
This line: 

How did one grow old - how could one become confident? 

Reminded me of one of my favorite Virginia Woolf lines, from To the Lighthouse:

What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? -startling, unexpected, unknown?

On Sundays
This line about Sundays, which I absolutely loved: 

It came to be, gradually, that after church on Sundays the house was really something of a sanctuary, with peace breathing like a strange bird alighted in the rooms. Indoors, only reading and tale-telling and quiet pursuits, such as drawing, were allowed. Out of doors, all playing was to be carried on unobtrusively. 

Reminded me of this line from Swann's Way, when the young boy narrator's aunt scolds him for reading during the week - What! still amusing yourself with a book? It isn't Sunday, you know!"

On tumultuous love
Many lines, but in particular this one, reminded me of the wildly up-and-down love in The Beautiful and Damned: 

Unless she would come to him, he must remain as a nothingness. It was a hard experience. But, after her repeated obliviousness to him, after he had seen so often that he did not exist for her, after he had raged and tried to escape, and said he was good enough by himself, he was a man, and could stand alone, he must, in the starry multiplicity of the night humble himself, and admit and know that without her he was nothing. He was nothing. But with her, he would be real. If she were now walking across the frosty grass near the sheep-shelter, through the fretful bleating of the ewes and the lambs, she would bring him completeness and perfection.

On early love
This depiction of Will and Anna Brangwen in the early days:

This then was marriage! The old things didn't matter any more. One got up at four o'clock, and had  broth at tea-time and made toffee in the middle of the night. One didn't put on one's clothes or one did put on one's clothes. He still was not quite sure it was not criminal.

Reminded me of this moment from The Master and Margarita:

During the Maytime storms, when streams of water gushed noisily past the blurred windows, threatening to flood their last refuge, the lovers would light the stove and bake potatoes. The potatoes steamed, and their charred skins blackened their fingers. There was laughter in the basement, and in the garden the trees would shed broken twigs and white clusters of flowers after the rain.

And these, from Their Eyes Were Watching God:

It was so crazy digging worms by lamp light and setting out for Lake Sabelia after midnight that she felt like a child breaking rules. That’s what made Janie like it. They caught two or three and got home just before day. Then she had to smuggle Tea Cake out by the back gate and that made it seem like some great secret she was keeping from the town."

“Ah’ll clean ’em, you fry ’em and let’s eat,” he said with the assurance of not being refused. They went out into the kitchen and fixed up the hot fish and corn muffins and ate. Then Tea Cake went to the piano without so much as asking and began playing blues and singing, and throwing grins over his shoulder. The sounds lulled Janie to soft slumber and she woke up with Tea Cake combing her hair and scratching the dandruff from her scalp. It made her more comfortable and drowsy.

Lines I Liked

• Waves of delirious darkness ran through her soul. 

• If she could but get away to the clean free moonlight.

• In the morning the sun shone, she got up strong and dancing. 

Words that were new to me:
farouche - sullen or shy in company


oriflamme - a scarlet banner or knight's standard; (literary) - a principle or ideal that serves as a rallying point in a struggle

recusant - a person who refuses to submit to an authority or to comply with a regulation

stook - a group of sheaves of grain stood on end in a field

wattle - a material for making fences, walls, etc., consisting of rods or stakes interlaced with twigs or branches

Well, I'm off to enjoy the rest of this sanctuary Sunday, with 'peace breathing like a strange bird alighted in the rooms'. Wishing you that same peace and sense of sanctuary, and the ardent hope that tomorrow morning, the sun will shine and you will get up strong and dancing. I'm off to read Purple Dentures, or something of that sort. 

I needed to be alone so that he could come back.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Published in 2005

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

This is the story of Joan and John
and Quintana, their only child.

We start at the end; John has died,
Joan is left to deal.
Quintana, just married, is ill herself,
In the ICU trying to heal.

We follow Joan as she lives the year,
Trying to sort herself out.
Quintana gets better, then worse,
Then better, fighting bout after bout.

Joan thinks that maybe John will come back,
Perhaps dying is not fully real.
She writes and thinks and waits and hurts,
Grieving, not wanting to feel.

In the end, it's Joan, on her own, alone,
Muddling her lone way through.
Quintana is healthy for a time, not long,
The family of many now few.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbists, 

I finished this book rather quickly, but I needed some time to sit with it before I could blob about it. It was dark, but it wasn't so much the darkness that stayed me, but the contemplative nature of the writing. If I had to say which books this reminded me of most, I think I would say The Tale of Genji or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There's something very dreamlike about the writing, and it feels almost painfully honest. 

Without further ado, I'll share my thoughts. 

Writing to find meaning
I found it fascinating that Joan was using this work to explore her own grief, and it felt beautifully intimate in that sense. Here are two lines I liked that illustrate this: 

The way I write is who I am, or have become. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.

Who is the director of dreams, would he care? Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Grief, unexpected
I have experienced some grief in my life, but the most recent, and in some ways most immediate, loss that I underwent was the recent passing of my dear cat, Susan. Those of you who follow my blob regularly know that she meant a very great deal to me, and we had almost eleven excellent years together. Still, I found that her death came with many surprises. 

This line - Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it - felt very apt to me. I found myself wanting her ashes, wanting an urn, wanting to make a shrine, all things I had not imagined I would want. I did not know how I would want to grieve her until the time came. 

And this line - Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone - struck me, too. I felt particularly alone after Susan died because I was the only one for whom the loss was so total. She lived with me, and it was just we two, and so for no one else was the loss so apparent, so continuous, so ever present. I can only imagine the multiplication of this pain if this loss were a partner, a lover, a creative collaborator, and a best friend, all of which were true for Joan and John. 

Drawing the circle
Joan sets the scene for us the day her husband dies. She and he were returning from the ICU where they were visiting Quintana, their daughter, and they were back in their pleasant New York apartment. I love this line about a fire in the fireplace: 

Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night.

It seems so poignant because of course this fire does not keep them safe through the night. It is true, though, that we create auras of coziness and warmth and we do feel a certain protection from them, but they cannot keep death from our door. 

They know before we do
As Joan explores the last weeks of her husband's life, looking back in retrospect during the year that comes after, she realizes that he seems to have known his own death was in store. She thinks of this line: 

Only the dying man can tell you how much time he has left. Chanson de Roland

and realizes that there were small clues, small moments, in which he seemed to suggest that he knew his time was almost up. Susan was sick with something - what exactly is still a bit unclear - but she lost a lot of weight, and then in the end, she stopped eating and drinking. On the last day, the day I was to take her to the vet to have her put to sleep, we laid in my bed for hours, and she slept right on my chest, over my heart, something she had never done before. I don't know what I believe in as far as spirituality is concerned, but I know in my heart that she knew this was the end. I believe that she told me when it was time. 

Later, Joan sees things that John left - notes and messages, and wonders to herself - When did he begin seeing himself as dead?

Magical thinking
Admittedly, I knew nothing about this book before I read it (because, as you know, readers, I do not like to be told what a book is about or what I will think of it before I read it) but this meant that I mistakenly thought it was about magic, when it reality, the "magical thinking" was really more like wishful thinking. Here are some examples of this: 

After John's death in NY - I found myself wondering, with no sense of illogic, if it had also happened in Los Angeles.

On wanting people to leave her alone - I needed to be alone so that he could come back.

On buying scrubs at the hospital store when Quintana is in the ICU again in CA - So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries.

Death and dying
Joan explores many fictional representations of death throughout the book, looking for meaning or moments of resonance. I liked this particular thought, which is in reference to the story of Alcestis, the mythical queen of Thessaly, wife of King Admetus: 

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he? 

Admittedly, the rhymer in me wants that last line to read "but does he believe that? Do I?"

Death, a disaster to be averted
I read a book recently called God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria, Jr., and there were many interesting things in it, but perhaps the one that stuck out to me most is the idea that in western culture, death is some sort of villain or enemy or trap, that if we're just careful enough, we can evade, whereas in the tribal culture, death is a natural component of the life cycle, and while losses are mourned, they are also expected. This line of Joan's reminded me of that: 

How open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame.

Referents and reverberations
In another amusing twist, one of the authors Joan looks to is D.H. Lawrence, who is the author of the next book on my list. This is the line she references: 

D.H. Lawrence - I never saw a wild thing/ sorry for itself

Lines I Liked:

• We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings. 

• The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. 

• On the peacocks near one of their homes - At dusk they would scream and try to fly to their nests in the olive trees, a fraught moment because they would so often fall.

New to me:

jacaranda tree - a sub-tropical tree native to south-central South America that has been widely planted elsewhere because of its attractive and long-lasting pale indigo flowers. 

Well, dear readers, that is all I have to say today. I have a new adorable feline friend - Twix is her name and playing is her game. She knows she is not to replace Susan in this household, but to join the cat energy of our home, and I think Susan would be amused by her vim and vigor. 

If you have lost someone or some thing, I hope that this post made you feel a bit less alone. If not, I hope we didn't bring your mood down too much for this beautiful Sunday. 

Sending love, hope, and hugs your way, today and all days! Keep safe, keep faith, good night.