Flannery O'Connor. I had read several of the stories in this collection already but not all of them, not "The Displaced Person," which was my favorite, nor "The River," which is more along the lines I expect from Flannery O'Connor. Recently the Suspects were naming their favorite short stories, and someone opined that Usans have the short story market. These stories support that point of view.
Kate Seredy's 1938 book is more worthy of a Caldecott than a Newbery. A lot more of the earlier winners, before the Baby Boom gave children's lit wings, are meant to be educational than my favorites of the '70s and '80s, and perhaps that's why I can't quite agree with its medalling.
An epic-ish (-ish because short, but epic- because spanning generations and featuring heroes and legends) history of Hungary winning the Newbery medal in 1938 indicate that political correctness might be an older mode of thought than I would have reckoned. If WWII hadn't broken out yet, Hungary--this book suggests it was the Huns, not the Magyars--already had begun to smack down Jews and the Ukraine, as Upon the Head of a Goat suggests.
But the illustrations are fabulous.
All I had in mind for yesterday was the semi-annual, changing-of-the-clocks weekend window-swapping. I brought the storms outside, removed the screens, and hosed the windows. Rinse, lather, rinse, for windows and storms; up the ladder again to squeegee and hang the storms; screens exiled to the coal cellar. Then it was time to enable the swamp cooler's hibernation. Getting on the roof led to cleaning the gutters (beginning to, anyway), and RDC trimmed the vinca so we won't have green icicles crawling around the sidewalk. I do not rake leaves until everything is down, except for trimmed vinca and the plum leaves within it. I brought the one barrowload of leaves in back, which led to raking the compost from a few weeks ago into the garden, and before that taking out the last of the tomato and pepper plants, and cursing the squirrels who have eaten more of my tomatoes and eggplants than I have, and finding an overlooked and therefore squishy cucumber.
When I dug the compost out of the two bins a couple of weeks ago, I just mounded the new dirt in the gardens; today I dug it into place. I covered the gardens with landscaping cloth and rocks, but the weeds have read different stuff about that cloth than I have because they still grow under it. I took up the cloth that covers about a quarter of the backyard and hoed and raked all that processing compost: it's very happy where it has coffee grounds and vegetable pulp but sunflower seed husks just don't break down readily.
After that I rolled the Russian olive stump away from the brush pile and commenced to sorting the pile. The spot underneath flummoxes me. Is flummox a transitive verb? Shit, Merriam-Webster labels it transitive but not also intransitive, which means I can't say "I am flummoxed." Poo. In the time Before, someone laid black plastic at the end of the garage, piled large gravel on it, bordered it with brick, and called it done. Cherry shoots and bindweed grow through plastic and gravel both, and I don't know how to stop them.
The stump has been in that very spot since June, when RDC noticed it wobble when a squirrel jumped on it. He plinked it with his thumb and over it went, and there it has lain since. My stepfather, when he was here, complimented us on our bench, and bench it is likely to remain because we don't have a chainsaw and the wood would probably bend a jillion Sawzall blades and I have noticed that sawing through something thick with a hacksaw gets old fast.
Anyway, I sorted the brush into kindling, tinder, mulch, and Mulchman Mulch. There's a fellow in our neighborhood who is trying to mulch himself to the moon, and last year's raspberry canes are not so much tinder as a waste of space. I started to throw last year's sagebrush in the discard pile as well, but I snapped one branch and decided that as tinder it's pointless to fuel a fire but excellent for fragrance.
Then I was done. The last day of Daylight Time, and I hope I savored it adequately.