By the Square in Crozet, Virginia, yesterday --- I was early for coffee so went for a little walk in this lovely town, which I hope to visit again soon, not least because such lovely people live there (ahem *Juanita* ahem).
I have come back to much work, so posting here will be brief-ish, unless I decide to procrastinate, which is always possible. But here's some news:
The novel should be up very soon for pre-orders. A description, plus some lovely words about it:
Kirsty Sain, aging housekeeper for the newly arrived young priest, assumes that despite this personnel change in her rural parish, her own solitary rounds will proceed as always. She will go to Mass, clean the rectory, go home again. She will keep herself to herself in the safely-hedged present and coexist in detente with the past. When a hairless, eyeless kitten is thrust upon her, an unlikely deterrent to the mice invading her house, she declares, “I am not going to love that thing.” She has spent a lifetime armoring herself against the risks of affection. But between the hapless Father Schuyler, who teeters on the edge of breakdown, and the crises of the Malkins, a parish family whose cheerful chaos erupts in tragedy, Kirsty finds her own wounds broken open. Drawn against her will into the sufferings of these vulnerable lives, she returns to an old hero, the Elizabethan poet-priest Robert Southwell, whose “Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears” provides a skeleton key to her own locked heart. In Southwell’s words, “love is the fire” that renders all things new.
I am always hoping to find novels like this one, but so rarely do I find them. What a gift to spend time with Kirsty, whose story is both ordinary and luminous, as a story like this reminds me every life must be. Thomas's writing is wry, clear-eyed, restrained, and above all, beautiful. This is a debut novel, which is a terrible shame for anyone (like me) who'd have liked to go out and devour five more of her novels right away, but what marvellous news for the American literary landscape.
—Natalie Morrill, author of The Ghost Keeper, Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction
So anyway, that's pretty exciting.
Otherwise, yesterday I wore this exact outfit. And today I am wearing this exact outfit. I've been sleeping in my Camellia lately, because she's just the right kind of thermal for hot summer nights, but as she still feels and smells fresh, all I did today was change out what I was wearing underneath, and I'm good to go. It seems kind of silly to keep taking different pictures of the same thing . . . although I have no problem with actually wearing the same thing over and over. I'm ridiculously happy that, having worn non-swing-dress outfits last weekend, I can just wear my happy default all this week and still observe this July challenge, which I'm getting kind of tired of. I don't know why I'm getting tired of it, because it's not like it's been the least bit onerous, but there is a part of me that is saying to another part of me: Stop telling me what I can and can't wear.
At any rate, the month has dashed by. I don't know how it's happened. I was embarking on this silly little challenge, and somehow now I have three days left in it after today. AND THEN I CAN WEAR WHATEVER I WANT . . . oh, wait. It's not like I wasn't doing that anyway, but now I can just put on swing dresses with impunity and forget the rest of the closet, which might be a good strategy for August. Before I know it I'll be packing the college kids into the car, with the swords and shields and bass and guitar and amp and everything else, and off we will go. And then I'll be back, and . . . well, I know perfectly well that life won't be so bad. I'll have my house to set in order, my dog to walk, my writing to do. I have loved having people home, but I'm starting to look forward to the solitude a little. Really, Kirsty in my novel is NOT AT ALL unlike me in many essential ways. I could become her, so easily. In fact, though I wasn't that conscious of it as I was writing, in many ways I think I was writing myself to myself, as a warning and a remedy.
Well, stuff to do, stuff to do. But I'll leave you with this poem by Ruth Pitter (from her Collected Poems, which I have finally bought and which was waiting for me when I got home yesterday). This poem has been stopping me dead in my tracks for more than thirty years, ever since I first encountered it in an anthology:
I'll probably be posting a lot of Ruth Pitter, plus excerpts from the book's introduction by Elizabeth Jennings.
And now, really . . .