Weekly update: passages, a finish, hopscotch, and two great books

Signs of spring: the scilla have begun to bloom.  The aquilegia (columbine) have sprouted. Bring on the daffodils! 

In home improvement news, the 50-year-old windows were replaced this week.  (The exception is the five-pane bay window in the living room which has to be custom-ordered.)  My bathroom remodeling is finally done with the last wall patch plastered over and painted.  

We had to bundle up on Friday to plant blue pinwheels for Child Abuse Prevention Month.  It's one of the GFWC-Illinois signature projects.  

Sad news:  two Zion Women's Club members passed away last week at age 91 and 89.  Our across-the-street neighbor passed away last week, at 90.  Our good friend Bob has added hospice to his caregivers. He's been taken off all his medications, though when I went to visit this afternoon he was visiting with the pastor and another church friend while wife Liz and the four daughters were enjoying their weekly Scrabble game. (They live just the right distance for me to get a good walk.  I share books with Liz. The book I took today is reviewed in this post.)

On the other hand, I saw an estate sale sign when I left church this morning. I knew the house!   I was relieved when the estate sale people said that Genny has moved to assisted living so the sale was to downsize.  I bought a few things, including  yellow and red Pyrex mixing bowls.  (I got the turquoise bowl at a sale last year....hopefully there will be a green one at a bargain price sometime soon.)   When I got home I called Genny.  "I'm going down to lunch," she said cheerfully.  She's moved to a congregate housing place in Zion, a decision entirely on her own. She's fine and happy at 94.   I aspire to her example!

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Creme de la Crumb is quilted and bound. 

The bright primary-color 'fruit salad' print on the back looks like a contemporary retro -- but it's genuine vintage CranTex (Cranston), 45" wide.  I got it at a thrift shop a couple of years ago.  The green insert is to add contrast and so that I didn't have to try to match the two pieces.

I've made 26 CW hopscotch blocks. The pattern calls for 42.

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My husband is a big fan of the Joe Pickett mysteries by C. J. Box. I've begun listening to the audio version narrated by David Chandler.  (He also narrated the Cork O'Connor series by William Kent Krueger.)  I've finished #1 and am nearly done with #2.  Stevens has #22, published in March, in the stack next to his chair.) 

Listening aside, I read two great books this week, one by a long-time favorite author and the other by a new writer.  

"The Rembrandt light of memory, finicky and magical and faithful at the same time, as the cheaper tint of nostalgia never is," writes narrator Paul Milliron about the momentous year of 1910 -- when Halley's Comet entered the heavens and when Rose Llewellyn and Morrie Morgan entered their prairie farming community. Rose came to be housekeeper for the Millirons (widower Oliver, Paul, and younger brothers Damon and Toby). Morrie came with his sister and when the schoolteacher eloped with a traveling evangelist he stepped in as a most unusual and inspiring schoolmaster in the one-room rural school.

Ivan Doig's writing is exquisite and his storytelling is memorable. A couple of years ago I acquired a paperback copy of The Whistling Season. It's been in the "someday" stack. My husband read it ("This is good," he said) and it went back on the stack. Someday finally arrived and, oh, I so enjoyed traveling back in time to the Montana prairie.

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"What is the purpose of a map?....Maps were love letters written to times and places their makers had explored. They did not control the territory--they told its stories....[Maps] bring people together." (p. 372)

When cartographer Daniel Young dies suddenly in his office in the Map Division of the New York Public Library his estranged daughter Nell, herself a cartographer, finds a not-so-old map in a hidden compartment in his desk. What is the significance of a 1950's gas station road map? As Nell soon learns, someone wants that map very, very much. Nell's investigation into the map's history and its meaning to her parents and their once-tightly-knit circle of fellow cartographers uncovers long-hidden secrets and a long-hidden town.   It's a grand adventure!

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