A Long Read in Postcards 4

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I’ve been slowly absorbing the newestAnne Morrow Lindbergh volume of diaries and letters, Against Wind and Tide. I can’t read it in great chunks as I have done her other volumes, and in fact I have been able to absorb only a few small chapters at a time. These are much edited diaries and letters, and the editors didn’t leave out of depressions or sadness instead compressed the writings. From the period just after the war until her grandson’s Jonathan’s death in 1986, at a similar age when she lost her first born son, the editors offer us a much slimmer volume than I expected. I’ve been taking breaks with the Dali Lama, Thomas Merton…his editors leaned toward Christianity, and a bit of a mystery here or there. Today I finished Against the Wind and Tide. I had wanted to feel more triumph when her volume on aloneness was such a big success. Perhaps more details. I hoped for more details, if they existed, on how she created the previous volumes of her diaries and letters not just a note here or there on the struggle. Once her husband had died, she found herself alone, and unexpectedly lonely. At the end, I completely understand her inability to gather her notes on aging into a book. “A note book perhaps,” she writes. I too grow slower. Many of her thoughts on age and widowhood are in this book thanks to her editors. She had a series of strokes and died before the news of Charles Lindbergh’s three European families came to light. I’m so glad. Her writings stir me to write more in my journal pages. I write so little these days when before I filled pages with my notes. I often wonder if there is anyone at home here. Then again, no one is pushing me down Abbott street in a shopping cart or chasing me with a machete, so I just need to bestir myself to make more from nothing at all.

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• Himself: No snow wrecks yet. Pre winter stuff. Life will get interesting then.
• Me: A few books came in. I took back two shelves that had been given over to CD’s. A Yo Yo quilt came in. It took me hours to find out what it was called and get a guess on the price.
• Reading: Jacqueline Winspeer’s “A Lesson in Secrets.”
• Balance: Shelving books today.