Letters, Quotes, Memory,
& Recipes.
You Can't Have It All
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves
like clown hands gloved with green...
You can have the purr of the cat
and the soulful look of the black dog,
the look that says,
If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled,
and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so.
I haven't written about writing letters in quite some time, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing letters. While it's true that I don't correspond as frequently with others as I was doing a couple years back when I wrote a letter every single day for a year, I still have a collection of friends with whom my correspondence is solely through handwritten letters, back and forth, pen to paper, red flag to red flag.
I have been thinking this week about God being the one who prepares us for leaving our mortal bodies behind. It is hard to imagine how we will view our earthly lives once they are past. These days on earth seem so real now, but I think later they will feel like only a dream. I hope I won't forget what it was like to eat a Banana Nut crepe at Tandem or to waterski or to read The Secret Garden to my kids.
The brilliant Nicholas Carr didn't have to go all Robert Frost on me to make me like his writing even more. I just finished Carr's book The Glass Cage, which I read shortly after reading his earlier book The Shallows. Both of the books opened my eyes to technology's influence on the working world and on our souls.
