The Stories I've Sown
In anticipation of the new movie adaptation, I'm rereading A Wrinkle in Time. Madeleine L'Engle is one of my all-time favorites, and I probably read Many Waters about five times during my middle and high school years, but I couldn't remember exactly when I'd read A Wrinkle in Time - until I found myself having flashbacks to my intermediate school gym as I was reading the other night. It's weird how closely I associate Mrs. Whatsit with the lurid fluorescent lights, echoing cacophony, and shiny waxed wooden floors of that gymnasium. As my thoughts are drawn up into Meg's attic bedroom, I can also feel the sway and bump of my 6th grade school bus, stopping and going, swooshing and creaking as it trundles a sardine-packed load of sweaty, loud preadolescents through the town. And for the scene with the houses that all look alike with the kid and his ball, I'm back in that gym, where the scent of Awkward is still so strong. (I must've had a lot of "down time" in PE...)
For the past decade, I've spent as much time listening to audiobooks as actually reading the pages for myself, and so I have memories of scenes from various books dropped like tiny seeds in locations all over the city and across the highways I've traveled. Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code maps the route Philip and I drove to a family Christmas in Colorado one year, and my first Jasper Fforde book, Something Rotten perplexed us - and kept us awake - for that long drive across Texas from Brady to Tyler (it was the fourth in a series of books that really ought to be read in order; they are marvelously convoluted tales as it is, so there's no need to add extra disorder to the mix). My old commute to work on the North Side is populated with a lot of Richard Peck novels and the Uglies trilogy. The highways between here and my parents' house must have countless stories, but Jo Baker's Longbourne and Sophie Kinsella's Twenties Girl both continue to haunt very specific spots along those roads. E.B. White's lovely reading of Charlotte's Web kept us going from here to Balmorhea one summer, and that big rest stop midway always reminds me of sweet, simple Wilbur.
Audiobooks have long been my best motivation for jogging; in fact, I am proud to say that I jogged the entire Harry Potter series... and let me tell you, a few of those scenes with the Dementors are downright creepy when you are jogging alone on a dark early morning! But I always knew Jim Dale would get me through it... and those recordings are still, I think, the best audiobook recordings ever made. But once the final word was spoken on Harry and Dumbledore and the whole fantastic clan, I stuck to jogging with novels - and my rule of not "cheating" and listening to them while I was not working out. (Yardwork did qualify as "working out," and so Because of Winn Dixie and one of the other Fforde Thursday Next novels are forever attached to the wild and unkept yard of wisteria and weeds at our Tyler home that I occasionally attempted to tame.)
There is a neighborhood in Denton near my sister's old house that contains the climactic scene from Zuzak's The Book Thief, and last year, I left alongside a road in Natchitoches that part in Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children about the discovery of the Peculiars' photos. Several of the 2000's decade Texas Lone Star books line the streets of our neighborhood in Arlington Heights, including my first experience with The Hunger Games, before it gained much attention elsewhere (I was a librarian and working hard to stay up on new stuff). I remember that first chapter, and the horrifying realization of what the games were about, and I remember immediately questioning this as a good book for my library. But then I found myself grabbing my library's hardback copy to sneak in an extra chapter during breaks, and then putting that copy in the hands of anyone I could (once I'd finished, of course). The scene from Shipbreaker where he meets that girl and they find the sunken boat waits for me along the Trinity Trail, and the last half of that book lives up there on the second floor of 24 Hour Fitness, where the treadmills are.
The roads in my current neighborhood are rife with the stories I've experienced along them - lots of Bloody Jack novels, several revisited classics, my hesitant forays into the scary world of regular (read: not YA) fiction - and oh, kind Major Pettigrew and sweet Balthazar Jones, The Summer Before the War and The Readers of Broken Bow Recommend, and even Nick Hornby's Funny Girl - taught me not to fear the grown-up stuff so much, especially when the narrator is amazing. My early morning neighbors probably think I'm a quack because these books make me freely laugh out loud, and sometimes cry. I had to stop my jog altogether when I connected the dots about the characters in Lois Lowry's final book in The Giver collection, Son - after all, these lives, these stories, grip me so completely, immerse me in their realities, and cause the actual realities around me to morph into something more. A place with a story attached, growing quietly in the soil, a vision - a memory - that is mine alone to behold.
For the past decade, I've spent as much time listening to audiobooks as actually reading the pages for myself, and so I have memories of scenes from various books dropped like tiny seeds in locations all over the city and across the highways I've traveled. Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code maps the route Philip and I drove to a family Christmas in Colorado one year, and my first Jasper Fforde book, Something Rotten perplexed us - and kept us awake - for that long drive across Texas from Brady to Tyler (it was the fourth in a series of books that really ought to be read in order; they are marvelously convoluted tales as it is, so there's no need to add extra disorder to the mix). My old commute to work on the North Side is populated with a lot of Richard Peck novels and the Uglies trilogy. The highways between here and my parents' house must have countless stories, but Jo Baker's Longbourne and Sophie Kinsella's Twenties Girl both continue to haunt very specific spots along those roads. E.B. White's lovely reading of Charlotte's Web kept us going from here to Balmorhea one summer, and that big rest stop midway always reminds me of sweet, simple Wilbur.
Audiobooks have long been my best motivation for jogging; in fact, I am proud to say that I jogged the entire Harry Potter series... and let me tell you, a few of those scenes with the Dementors are downright creepy when you are jogging alone on a dark early morning! But I always knew Jim Dale would get me through it... and those recordings are still, I think, the best audiobook recordings ever made. But once the final word was spoken on Harry and Dumbledore and the whole fantastic clan, I stuck to jogging with novels - and my rule of not "cheating" and listening to them while I was not working out. (Yardwork did qualify as "working out," and so Because of Winn Dixie and one of the other Fforde Thursday Next novels are forever attached to the wild and unkept yard of wisteria and weeds at our Tyler home that I occasionally attempted to tame.)
There is a neighborhood in Denton near my sister's old house that contains the climactic scene from Zuzak's The Book Thief, and last year, I left alongside a road in Natchitoches that part in Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children about the discovery of the Peculiars' photos. Several of the 2000's decade Texas Lone Star books line the streets of our neighborhood in Arlington Heights, including my first experience with The Hunger Games, before it gained much attention elsewhere (I was a librarian and working hard to stay up on new stuff). I remember that first chapter, and the horrifying realization of what the games were about, and I remember immediately questioning this as a good book for my library. But then I found myself grabbing my library's hardback copy to sneak in an extra chapter during breaks, and then putting that copy in the hands of anyone I could (once I'd finished, of course). The scene from Shipbreaker where he meets that girl and they find the sunken boat waits for me along the Trinity Trail, and the last half of that book lives up there on the second floor of 24 Hour Fitness, where the treadmills are.
The roads in my current neighborhood are rife with the stories I've experienced along them - lots of Bloody Jack novels, several revisited classics, my hesitant forays into the scary world of regular (read: not YA) fiction - and oh, kind Major Pettigrew and sweet Balthazar Jones, The Summer Before the War and The Readers of Broken Bow Recommend, and even Nick Hornby's Funny Girl - taught me not to fear the grown-up stuff so much, especially when the narrator is amazing. My early morning neighbors probably think I'm a quack because these books make me freely laugh out loud, and sometimes cry. I had to stop my jog altogether when I connected the dots about the characters in Lois Lowry's final book in The Giver collection, Son - after all, these lives, these stories, grip me so completely, immerse me in their realities, and cause the actual realities around me to morph into something more. A place with a story attached, growing quietly in the soil, a vision - a memory - that is mine alone to behold.
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