16 Dec: rainy memoir reading and memory lane

Wednesday, 16 December 2020

Front Catio viewed from indoors

…And back Catio from inside the house

My reading, inspired by watching the film, The Post.

The large print edition is almost 1200 pages and, because Faerie and I caught up on the Tootlepedal blog and the Notes from the Hinterland blogs first….

….I managed about 300 more pages in the evening (before some telly: The Great British Baking Show Master Class (we are out of competition episodes) and the satisfying finale of The Amazing Race (our favourite team won).

My favourite Katharine Graham paragraphs so far…

About politicians and the press (Katharine’s father, then her husband, and then Katharine herself owned the Washington Post):

the more things change…

About JFK and other men of his circle:

“I seemed to carry inadequacy as baggage,” she wrote later, after her husband, Phil, had committed suicide and she began to manage The Post.

What I did not expect at all from the book was her story of her spouse being bipolar. This I could relate to, having spent 14 years in a relationship that, while we were dirt poor and she and Phil were wealthy, had many of the same sort of wrenching scenes. Those chapters were my favourite part, in a sad way.


Unlike Phil and JFK, Adlai Stevenson had a modern attitude toward women.

I found very touching this memory of Adlai shared after his untimely death.

Another intermission from reading time was when something now unremembered inspired me to look up my parents’ retirement home near Yelm, which my widowed mother sold to move here in 1999. I was deeply touched to see that her garden was still there and wish I could show these photos to her. She and my father created it out a scrubby woods and stony soil. Photos from a real estate listing around 2015:

My mother would love to see how well the garden was cared for.

Next to my dad’s large shop building (which he had built and was full of his assorted collections and tools and lumber), I could see that whoever lived there afterward was a plant fancier.

Even the large vegetable area at the back of the shop was sort of preserved, although without the raspberry rows….

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…but a later satellite photo sadly shows that area all turned to lawn, so it seems the garden, too, might be gone now. Still, it survived for at least 15 years after my mother moved away, and that’s pretty unusual. She’d also be pleased that her beloved wood stove is still there. (I realized from the photos that her double wide floor plan was pretty much identical to the one I live in now.)

She and I and Robert created a beautiful garden here for her for her, which she enjoyed for ten years. It was on the local,garden tour in 2009, but unlike her garden near Yelm, it disappeared into lawn with two years of being sold.

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I “attended” the zoom meeting of our county public health department this morning. We have had over fifty new cases of Covid in the past week.

Over the course of the pandemic

For USA residents, a handy calculator for when you might get the vaccine can be found here . It tells me I am behind 2.4 million others at higher risk in my state and behind 9,800 in my county. Allan is the same. We figure there are a few thousand anti vaxxers (anti all vaccines, not just cautious about this one) in our county, which will put us higher up the list, but we wish it were not so.