Reading Grounded in Being Home

Today I spent part of the day emptying my walk-in closet.  Tom has bought a new closet system for me.  As I was carrying all my clothes and other items from one side of the house to the other, I thought about our move into the house.  I looked around each room.  Tom and I physically moved every piece of furniture and every household item into the house ourselves.  In some cases, we moved items twice, moving boxes into the connex last summer for temporary storage and then moving it up to the house.  I have two observations after today's exercise.  First.  Man, oh man...I have A LOT of clothes!  Second.  I'm about tired of moving stuff!  I know for sure Tom is too. 

The house and the move have been consuming.  So I thought I'd mix things up and do a book blog.  I haven't done one since the new year.  I've been reading but notably at a slower pace in the first quarter of the year.  It felt like a bit of a slog but I did read 10 books between January and April.  Something kicked into gear in May and I read seven in one month.  I'd been wondering if I'd finish my Read Harder challenge this year but after finishing two more books so far in June, I'm over halfway through.  A comfortable place to be at the middle of the year.  I thought I'd write about a few of my recent favorites.  

Yesterday I finished The Forgotten Botanist: Sara Plummer Lemmon's Life of Science & Art by Wynne Brown.  I attended an author event at the Tucson Botanical Garden in November where Wynne gave a fantastic presentation on Sara and the book.  It's a great book.  Sara and her husband J.G. did botanical exploration throughout California, Arizona, Mexico and New Mexico in the late 1800s.  I didn't know this until the book event but Mount Lemmon here in Tucson is named in Sara's honor.  

The intrepid botanical explorers spent many years in the Sky Island mountain ranges to the east of Tucson.  They probably passed just miles south of our house on many occasions.  Sara and J.G. knew John Muir and Clara Barton.  Sara helped establish the Red Cross chapter in California and fought for 10 years to have the poppy identified as the State Flower of California.  

They also attended the World's Fairs in both New Orleans in 1884-5 and Chicago in 1893.  Sara was not only a gifted scientist but also a talented artist painting many of the botanical specimens they found.  The book has many photographs of her beautiful artwork.  I learned that if the word plummeria or lemmonia are part of a plant's name it's connected to this talented duo.

Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan has been on my bookshelf for probably close to 10 years.  I have long wanted to read it.  I finally got to it in May and it proved a perfect companion to my daily observations of our Prickly Pear and Cholla blooming.  Gary, an agricultural ecologist, who lives here in the Tucson area, made it a personal goal back around 2000 to eat only from the local food shed, within 220 miles of his home.  He writes about foraging, including the harvesting of cactus fruit.  This is something I'm very interested in learning more about as I watch our prickly pear fruit slowly begin to change from green to purple.    

In that same vein of local foods, I also read Emma Zimmerman's cookbook The Miller's Daughter, which tells a brief history of her and her father reopening the Hayden Flour Mills here in Arizona more than 10 years ago.  The cookbook is organized into chapters featuring their main grains (and one legume): White Sonora, Heritage Bread Wheat, Farro, Barley, Einkorn, Corn, Durum, Chickpeas, Oats and Rye.  I want to make every recipe in this gorgeous book.  I told Tom this and his response...why don't you?  I think I just might.  

The book accompanied by a Barrio Bread loaf.

Here's a little bit of Hayden Flour Mills trivia for you.  If you watch Chef's Table on Netflix, watch the pizza episode featuring Chris Bianco.  The local flour he is talking about and and uses at his world-renowned pizzeria is from Hayden Flour Mills.  I don't know for sure but I would also guess that Barrio Bread here in Tucson is also a customer.  

Barrio Bread uses heritage grains in their breads and the owner and baker Don Guerra won the James Beard award last year for Outstanding Baker.  Emma was recently nominated for a James Beard award too for a cookbook in the bread category.      

You're probably sensing a bit of a theme here.  I've got a strong interest in learning about local food.  Whether farmers, ranchers or food artisans. 

I am not a big poetry reader but I occasionally read a book of poems, usually for a book challenge.  For the first time I read a volume of poems and felt like it was a book I'd like to own and spend more time with.  It is How to Love a Country by Richard Blanco.  Richard was the inaugural poet at President Obama's second inauguration.  He is Cuban American and his poems explore lots of aspects of the immigrant experience and what it means to be an American and 'who is' and 'isn't' considered an American. 

One of my favorite poems from the collection is "Now Without Me."  Here's just two parts:

"To believe I didn't begin with me, or will end with me, never been a me, but a soul beyond clinging to any home or country---a larger part of the continuum in the amber light of each dawn..."

"The cosmos may well be a chance clash of rock, a callous dust, but now that sometimes I forget names and days of the week, I want to believe all my endeavors as willed by an eternal desire held in the wide-open arms of the Milky Way..."  

One of my book challenges this year is to finish a book that I previously did not finish.  After discarding my initial selection, I chose to read Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther.  A book that was commonly assigned in high school back in the early 90s.  Not sure if it still is.  The book shares the story of John's seventeen year old son Johnny who was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died.  I folded the corners of pages and underlined many parts of this book.  Johnny was intellectually curious and gifted and had an amazing spirit.  He faced his illness and death with a lot of bravery and courage.  

His doctors said of him after his death: 

"He was the most gallant and soulful child I ever met," Dr. Levy.  

"He had the most brilliant promise of any child I have ever known," Dr. Traeger.  

The book opens with John Donne's poem by the same name.  It's a poem I think most of us read at some point during our school lives.  I underlined the last sentence.  "One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!"    

At the end of the book, Johnny's mother Frances Gunther provides a chapter.  I underlined so much of what she wrote.  I'll share just one part.  She writes:

"I wish we had loved Johnny more when he was alive. ... Loving Johnny more.  What does it mean?  What can it mean, now?"

"It means caring more and more about other people, at home and abroad, all over the earth.  It means caring more about God.  I hope we can love Johnny more and more till we too die, and leave behind us, as he did, the love of love, the love of life."         

"The love of life."  

I think we can all get overwhelmed, exhausted and distracted in our lives.  And there can certainly be seasons when the grind is worse than at other times.  But let's not let it all be at the expense of forgetting the incredible gift of just being alive.  I read Johnny's story and think...I need to do more to love and support those who are in my life.  

In the wonderful words of my forever crush Keanu Reeves, when asked by Stephen Colbert 'what do you think happens when we die?' Keanu said, "I know that the ones who love us will miss us."  Here's a link to the interview.  Start listening at 8:47.   

And just as a treat, since you've read this far, here is a picture of me 'with' Keanu following our trip to the cinema to see John Wick 4. 

And just some random personal trivia.  I had two movie posters on my bedroom wall when I was in high school and they were both Keanu movies -- Speed and A Walk in the Clouds.  I used to kiss them goodnight and practice writing my name...

Nicole Reeves. <3