Spring Changes
After a week of rains and Bunny Day, the vegetation and wildlife are starting to visibly change. The juncos are lessening and moving on to their summer quarters. The spring birds are arriving — especially the blackbirds, including my favourite red-winged blackbirds. The daffodils tried their best but just missed blooming for Bunny Day. As much as the rain makes me nervous, I am still so happy to see the signs of renewal. That’s the best part of the spring. You need to look beyond the mud and see the flowers.
Unless, you’re on the trail. Then you should pay attention to the mud, lest you fall straight into it and make a lot of difficult laundry.
Lost and Found
Spring is the season when the winds start to blow and it feels like the outdoors starts calling us to wander farther on the trails, try out new ones, and enjoy getting a little bit lost. I was drawn to playwright Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles because I have a love of photos and descriptions of old motels. So I was eager to go with Shepard through the American landscapes via these unique places of rest but also discovery.
A Mix of Mediums
While I did enjoy Shepard’s fragmentary and meandering style, I will warn potential readers that, if you are in this just for a description of motels and places, this is very far from a travelogue. What Shepard is trying to describe is more a feeling. The feeling of wandering. The feeling of being lost on highways and in the liminal spaces lit by neon on the edges of them. He does this with a variety of things — journal entries, short essays, very short stories, poetry. It’s a wandering through literary mediums too, and it creates the experience for the reader in a very powerful way.
Small Reads for Renewal
This review is short, because Motel Chronicles is composed of many fragments and is a short book. Not only do I think that it wouldn’t necessarily work as a longer piece, I also love a short, powerful read. Long books can be an immersive and enveloping experience. I like them too, but in the last few years, it feels like I haven’t had time for them. I don’t mean just time, either. I mean the mental space that they deserve in order to get the most out of them.
Short reads have been vital to keeping away last year’s very difficult reading slump. They also allow me to jump between stories and keep my mind engaged and happy with the variety. Short books are always a renewal for my brain!
The Cat Head
Part of spring renewal is washing some of the cats’ most frequently used beds and cleaning out their most frequently used spaces. The cat-head bed that normally sits downstairs was the first to go into the machine and come out lovely and fluffy. Since it did, the cats have not left it alone. There haven’t been any overt fights over it, but there has definitely been some subtle bullying. All when there are literally a dozen other places for them to sleep, all of them equally comfy-cozy.
