December to-do list

House:

Scrub kitchen walls.

Scrub, patch, and paint three of the four water-closet walls.

Try to repair fourth wall.

Pin cables in den.

Prepare other spot for new vegetable bed

Rerake

Clean for shower

Errands

New bike helmet

Reading:

Kent Haruf, Plainsong

Zora Neal Hurston, Stories

Arthur Philips, Prague

Cathleen Schine, She Is Me

Robertson Davies, Rebel Angels

Cornelia Funke, Thief Lord

Kinwork

Shower for Clove

Write and send Yule card

Wrap and send presents to AHLBF

Get presents: SMW, BDL, RED, RDC2, DMB, JHT, RSH, CLH, HAO, ZBD, BJWL, EKG, Blake, RDC, SPM&JJM&JPM

Ship presents: SMW, BDL, RED, RDC2, DMB, JHT, RSH, CLH, HAO, ZBD, BJWL, EKG

Lisa:

New baby giraffe (Taabu, born in September)

Chick Weekend in Boston

"Return of the King"

07:07

zora neal hurston

Love love love Zora Neal Hurston. "The sun swept itself across the horizon, months and weeks flaring out behind it." Or something, I was driving at the time.

I wonder if she and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings knew each other at all: they were contemporaries in time and space and avocation, if not in culture. Isn't it pretty to think so. Although they wrote about rural life in northern Florida and flourished within decades of each other, I notice Hurston's language but Rawlings's geography--probably because I've listened to Hurston but not to Rawlings (when I read The Yearling to RDC I apologized for butchering the accent, and again reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry). I haven't read Hurston describe the dance of the whooping cranes but I have listened to her build a shack and plant a garden and lie on her back gazing at the sky over the St. John's River.

"Drenched in Light," "The Conscience of the Court," "Muttsy," "The Gilded Six-Bits," John Redding Goes to Sea," and "Sweat."