We celebrated K's bithday today... she is eighteen. Her favorite dinner, tuesday at the movies and fresh flowers from our neighbor's garden. My, how the years have flown. Our girl loves to write ... we realize it is not just words on the page that she writes - but also a life. The words of Richard Wilbur becomes ours, "It is always a matter, my darling, Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish What I wished you before, but harder."
The Writer
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
-Richard Wilbur
In your book were written every one of them;
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there were none of them.
How precious are your thoughts, O God!
How vast the sum of them!
...They speak against you with malicious intent;
your enemies take your name in vain.
Search me, O God, know my heart.
Lead me in the way everlasting.
-Psalm 139
May your life ever be a beacon of His goodness
and a refutation to His enemies.
For a few years we have driven by an old bookshop here in Nashville, invariably it was closed. Today, we made our plan to visit, knowing we'd be in the area during business hours. After a quick breakfast, we babbled on over to the bookstore hoping it to be as good as our imaginations had surmised- "Elder's Bookstore - Tennessee's Oldest and Finest", that's what the card reads -after our short seventy minute visit and a grocery bag of books -we vehemately agree. We made many finds, our eyes were definately bigger than our pocketbook and the fact, we really did leave with a Harris Teeter bag full of finds, attests to our delish choice to eat rice and beans or whatever else is already in the cupboard, for the week, to feast on printed page. What fun!
