"Into This New Month"

The Lost Summer began mid-May. Between then and now-- i.e., during those four and one-half months-- I added 207 crappy old books to my library. That's one and one-half books per day!* Some came from my old haunts, others from a new crappy old bookstore I found in Jackson, still others from the Neuroscience & Anatomy conference room in the research wing of UMMC. (FYI: You can never have too many books on the anatomy of the lab rat. And who doesn't need a two volume, 2791 page reference on Medical Physics?)

I traveled to Birmingham, and then to Jackson, with many of my crappy old new books (and some old favorites). This one-- Meditations for Women (1948, edited by Jean Beaven Abernathy) was piled in a 'must read' pile on a table covered with a sheet to protect them-- the pile and the table-- from drywall dust until today when it traveled with me to Memphis.

As a woman, and a survivor of The Lost Summer, I read with interest the meditation for October 1:

Into This New Month 

The sun and the stars do not break up eternity into thirty-day cycles. Their schedule provides for no momentary slowing down to celebrate accomplishment, nor for any speeding up to dramatize a new beginning. 

But we who live under the sun and stars have a recurrent need to say, "There-- that much is done," and to say, "This is a fresh start." Out of our human need we design a calendar pattern that can be imposed upon the endlessness of time. 

And although all our logic may tell us that the first day of a new month is just like any other, yet our feelings tell a different story. With some flick of thought, some quickening of the spirit, we acknowledge the difference-- ahead of us there is a month in which anything can happen; in which no mistakes have yet been made; in which we can begin again.

Frankly, I think Bonoro W. Overstreet, author of October's meditations, might have benefitted from a little introduction to astrophysics. Though to her credit, she doesn't talk about the moon. But I liked the sentiment. A whole entire month in which no mistakes have yet been made! WhooHooo!! 

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN! The ceiling in the Greenhouse apartment might get painted! 

THERE! That much is done. I wrote a blog post!

*It tickles me no end when folks say stupid stuff like this. There's no such thing as 1.5 books. No one-- not even I-- buys a half a book! (Though I did buy an 1856 edition of Macaulay's The History of England from the Accession of James II Volume I which had a less than mint condition spine. I was missing Volume I. You take what you find when you find it.)