Tuesday 15 June 2021

Meandering

I don't remember what I did yesterday.  I am not sure anything really registered.  Everything I wanted to pursue had a component of things I needed the internet for.  I have been wandering around the house trying to figure out just what I did.

I started a new ball of yarn on my top.  Right,  I did put it on a string and I gave it a good try on.  It needs a tad more length and it may need the sleeves to be redone.  Not endless work, and in a way, not surprising but not happy about it.  Still I am determined to keep on till it is right. So there was that, but of the new ball, sweet little yardage has been consumed.

My bathroom drawers and counter tops are tidier than they have been in a while.  Apparently, you don't need to keep all your lotions and creams and ointments out on the counter if you have drawer space to put them in in a very convenient drawer.  It seems I was keeping empty pill containers.   A lot of them.

The kitchen door has zero boxes in front of it.  They have all been cut down and put out for recycle pickup.  The counters in there are awfully tidy too.  I can't take credit for that though.  Keith did that on Sunday.     

There is a pile of books on my footstool.  I have books tucked in every little corner of my home, and some of them are not that easy to get to.  I was thinking about things I have been reading or things that I have been listening to or watching and as usual, stuff that began in Agatha Christie's mind rank high here at Ville de Needles.   

I watched the movie Crooked House with Max Irons just before our internet ran out.  The story was so familiar and yet, not remembered at all, as they sometimes are.  I wondered if I had a copy of the book, so I squirreled  in and pulled them all out.  I have a half a shelf of hard covers picked up at used book stores over the years and a half a shelf of papaerbacks, some of which I bought and some of which were given to me from a pile of remaindered books they had to get rid of.  They used to do that.  Tear the covers off books that had not sold by a certain date and send them to the dump.  My friend was a big reader and I think it used to bother her a great deal that this was the way of the world in those days.  She would take huge boxes home and we would have coffee and I could take as many as I wanted before she burned them for heat in the workshop.  The deal was I was not to speak of it, and I never did.  Till now.  Strictly speaking, it was wrong, but I have a feeling Agatha would have understood.  There was so little money to spare and I needed to read the same as I needed to breathe.  

I played with this pile of books for the rest of the afternoon.  Reading the ends of stories, reading parts here and there.  Checking out any turned corner pages I found to see where I had left off.  It was like reaquainting myself with old friends.  It was lovely.

The only story that I knew I had read and reread and read again was And Then There Were None.  Somehow, I manage to suspend my knowledge of the story and am surprised each and every time I read it by who actually did it.  One of them, I have never read at all.  Death Comes as the End.  I really ought to read it.  I think I read most of the others paperback and hardcovers.   Some of them are certainly worth reading again.  

I have many of Christies books in my audio library and in my electronic book library, but there still are reasons to read the paper books, even if it is a strain and I cannot read them as I used to.  Sometimes, there is a turn of phrase that you catch or a view described or a detail of the character that becomes more sharp from the written word.  Sometimes you just need to pause and read a line out loud because it is so brilliantly written. 

Each story I see or read in a different format, I learn something a little different.  Each time, I find something fresh and new.   That is how you know quality and Christie is quality.  

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