It was a VERY blustery day today. We awoke to grey skies, rain spatters and windy windy winds. The birds were nowhere to be seen, no doubt hunkered down in the trees, and the feeders were both swinging in the breeze all day. Most of the leaves have been blown off the trees and everything is looking bare and ready for winter…except the green, green grass of our lawn. It looks better now than it did during the summer!
Anders leaves in the morning for 4 days training in Italy and it’s a super busy week, so I might not be able to post every day, though I’m still going to make the effort. Karin has open houses at two different gymnasiums plus soccer practice (am more and more happy about the moped), I have a hair appointment and there are still a lot of things to be done before our big Thanksgiving dinner next weekend.
I’m reading a book called How the Heather Looks, by Joan Bodger, which is the story of one family’s travels around England, some 40 years ago, in search of sites from classic children’s literature. They search for, among other things, Pook’s Hill (Kipling), the 100-acre wood (Winnie-the-Pooh) and Toad Hall (The Wind in the Willows).
It’s not the first book like this I’ve read… one of my favorites is Heidi’s Alp by Christina Hardyment, in which a different family did the same thing in 1985, all over Europe. They went to the title place, Hans Brinkers’ Holland, Hans Christian Andersen’s sites, and many others. I’ve also read The Wilder Life, which was written by blogger Wendy McClure, who has a fascination with Laura Ingalls Wilder and went on a road trip to find all the places she lived.
It’s a fascinating idea, isn’t it? To try to find the places you’ve read about, and fallen in love with, in books.
My mom and I have been to several writer’s homes, during my business trip weeks in the U.S., including Mark Twain, Emily Dickenson and Louisa May Alcott. It’s a shivery feeling you get, being in the home of someone you admire, who has written things that have affected you and stuck with you since childhood.
I think a trip like that sounds like a really fun idea, but I suspect my family would just give me the hairy eyeball. What about you? What book place would you like to see for real? I’ve always wanted to visit the lake country that Arthur Ransome wrote about in Swallows & Amazons. And I would love to see the Four-Story Mistake from Elizabeth Enright’s wonderful series about the Melendy family. The Little House on Plum Creek captured my imagination as a kid; that would be fun to see. A trip up Heidi’s alp is very appealing as well.