Nice

What's nicer than a moment in the day when the sky is blue AND it's thundering? That's what it was like last night at six o'clock, an hour I love because everything goes so quiet. People turn from their computers and join their  families, or else lie down for a bit before the evening or drink swigs of milk straight from the carton. In other words they stop for an hour and breathe. You can tell because emails stop coming and the chatter on Facebook falls way off.

At six last night I posted last weekend's column, changed my profile picture on Facebook and wrote to eight young people about going on November 9th to hear a talk by one Jill McDonough who helps people in prison write poetry. I may not be able to wait til then to meet her though; I may have to send her a letter now she seems so great. Her previous books have been about shipwrecks and pirates, hanging, tarring, gibbeting and the history of medicine. If my sister Nan had been a writer this is totally the stuff she would have written about. She did her first term paper on Premature Burial; all her childhood drawings are of corpses, mausoleums, people with blood dripping from the corners of their mouths…. She has said many times in her adult years “If I were a little kid today they'd have me on the couch SO fast!”

I don't agree. I look at shows like True Blood and Twilight and I can sure see it: Nan was just ahead of her time. :-)

Little Scowly-Face Goes to Camp, or, Which Child  Here is Mad about Vampires?