Such a silly, energy-sapping day. It started out with the intention to declutter. The book I am reading suggests that if something gives you joy, keep it. And if it doesn’t, discard it. So here I am at the end of the day, having gone nowhere but into confusion.
I did well at first, marching through the minutiae of my life with resolve. I got a respectable donation up for the Kidney Foundation, or whatever it is called, and they will be here Tuesday.
But in between paring down, I am reading a remarkable book, “All The Light We Cannot See.” It takes place in France during World War II, so it is filled with fear and death, interspersed with love and magic. In other words, it is about anyone’s life.
I put a pot of soup on early in the day and ate it way too early. Then I worked at getting more decluttering done, but I had done the easiest part first. Now I was faced with things I couldn’t get rid of so easily.
So I keep picking up the book and reading more. More about people being faced with severe deprivation, hunger and death. It makes my decluttering look rather ridiculous. I, who have more objects of beauty than I know what to do with, read about how the French people lost so much during the war. The heroine is a little blind girl who has been separated from her father. Blindness develops other qualities in a person, and she is a fascinating and lovable character.
Suddenly I am feeling the pain and loss of not only these characters but of my own. I, too, have lost family. I, too, have known hardship of an emotional nature. The knickknacks I have accumulated do not fill the holes they caused in my emotional body.
So I have called it a day on the decluttering. I need to take a walk when it cools down a bit. I will probably finish the book before bedtime. It is one of those books you can’t put down.
Vicki Woodyard
There was something about that book that touched me in a way that few other stories of WWII have- perhaps because it is written from the perspective of two children. I recently read that 70 million people were killed during the second world war, and somehow, that impossible-to-take-in number was brought to life by this book- a story of people doing what we always do- our best to survive with a sometimes surprising resilience in the face of forces well beyond even the illusion of control. I’ve been cleaning out bookshelves, but that one is a keeper I will reread in years to come. It opened my heart. That is the power of a well-told story.
Yes, an inspiring page-turner, in the best meaning of that word. I am inhaling it.