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.)