There are thin sunbeams slanting in our windows while we drink our coffee. The boys both slept in and the day has that lazy Sunday feel to it.
I am reading The Diviners again. Margaret Laurence is one of the writers whose style somehow bypasses the “translation step” that I normally need to “feel” the story.
I first read this book back in August of 2006. I had just separated from Lynn and was living in my camper with Max and Roy. ”Not wanted on the voyage” so to speak. In any case I was in bad shape, hardly able to string together two coherent thoughts and slowly starving myself to death in a sunbaked field where my friend Amanda Milliken had kindly allowed me to camp.
I had a stack of books that my mum had loaned me and was working through them at a snail’s pace. The Diviners though was read in one continuous push. I remember sitting under the van awning with the dogs at my feet, adjusting my position every so often as I cramped up, the sun baking us even in the shade.
The week spent in that field may have been the proverbial rock bottom for me. Life slowed down to slow motion in the summer heat, the smell of grass thick in the air.
It is the small things that can remind us that life goes on regardless. I woke one morning to the sight of a single mule deer peering in the window of my camper. It investigated the fringes of my little world and then disappeared into the trees at the pasture’s edge when the dogs stirred. With good fortune, that doe is still out in the forest, enjoying these same thin sunbeams.
