Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Saturday was too windy to play volleyball outside, but that meant I had time to check out a new-to-me bakery (excellent croissant, mediocre chai) and have Rachel come over for a cuppa and to pick up the tea she had included with our annual order.

2. This week’s floral bounty included the magnolias and the first hyacinths.

3. This week’s lunar eclipse was kind of a dud with low clouds appearing just at totality, but there were some lovely sunsets to make up for it.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Daffodils and croci are finally starting to pop here. It’s about a month later than I’ve seen daffs in recent years, but probably closer to when we should see them.

2. I headed down to the Mall on Friday evening to catch the Great Planetary Alignment. It was very cool, and I’m grateful to the stargazing app I have, which mostly helped me identify what I was seeing. (If you click through to Flickr, you can enlarge the photo to see the sliver of moon just on the horizon, as well as Mercury and Venus, I think. Jupiter and Mars are further up in the sky, out of shot, and Saturn had already set. Neptune and Saturn required magnification, which I didn’t have.)

3. John and Rebecca and I went out for Vietnamese food after volleyball on Saturday. The day had been sunny, but with a strong, steady breeze that sometimes pushed the ball yards away from its original trajectory and sent lightweight items (like the empty stake bag) flying for a block before I caught up with them. So a warm meal was especially welcome.

Things were warmer in D.C. this week, which, I’m not going to lie, makes it easier to find things beautiful. Here are three such moments:

1. It has been the chilliest winter in years, which means that I utterly misled people about playing outdoor volleyball through the colder months. But last Sunday tickled 50 degrees and I summoned folks to the Mall for the first time since mid-November. (The beach venue at the Paris Olympics has nothing on where I get to play…)

2. Rudi mentioned on my birthday that his social media was showing the year’s first snowdrops. The place where I’ve seen them most often in the past has kept their gates locked in recent years, so I had to wait an extra week until someplace more well trafficked popped.

3. It was so warm earlier on Wednesday that I headed up to the park to read and write some correspondence before meeting my friend Chris for a drink and a catch up. By the Spanish Steps, the daffodil heads were visible. Later than most years, but coming. And soon. (As an aside, cherry blossom peak bloom has been predicted for a month from today through the end of March. Squee!)

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately? Oh! And before I forget, there is a Great Planetary Alignment this evening right after sunset (in D.C. Peak time varies based on your location. Check the link). Head someplace with a clear view to the west just after sunset to see all the planets of our solar system arrayed on the same plane. (A few will require access to binoculars or a telescope to view, but the rest should be visible with the naked eye.)

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl focuses on books set in another time. Here are some of my favorites, all of which are set in the 20th century:

1. The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak (fiction, WWII)
2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (fiction, 1985 (I keep trying to say this is set in the 1950s, because this was most certainly not my experience of the mid-’80s))
3. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse (novel in verse, 1920s Dust Bowl)
4. Maus: A Survivor’s History by Art Spiegelman (graphic nonfiction, WWII)
5. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (fiction, 1940s)
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (fiction, early 20th century)
7. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (graphic novel, 1931)
8. Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Best Year in Baseball by Cait Murphy (nonfiction, 1908)
9. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (fiction, 1941)
10. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (fiction, 1940s and ’50s)

How about you? What are some of your favorite reads set in other times?

Three beautiful, birthdayish things from my past week:

1. I spent five hours at the pool hall with friends last Friday. We ate pizza and cupcakes and had many, many games of pool, with loud cheering and high fives for successful shots and close failures.

2. Texts, calls, gifts, and cards poured in through the weekend, from a container of muffins left on the stairs to our apartment to several boxes that the cats were delighted to claim as their own. (I kept the contents.)

3. On the morning of my birthday, Rudi and I went out for a doughnut breakfast and then headed to the zoo to meet the new pandas, who made their public debut late last month. It was a bluebird day, if a bit chilly, so the outdoor animals were largely recharging in the sun. It’s been a couple years since I’ve been to the zoo, which I always enjoy, particularly when it’s less crowded.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

One of the things I promised myself I’d do last year was to share the books I liked best in 2023, none of which I reviewed here. Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites me to get my act together and do a down-and-dirty update of this draft and finally hit publish:

1. Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
   Two generations of Dominican-American women with magical gifts (ranging from the ability to tell if someone is lying to possessing an “alpha vagina”) find their lives upended when Flor, whose gift is knowing when someone will die, announces she’s throwing herself a living wake. Organized as personal narratives/interviews told to Flor’s daughter, an anthropologist, the chapters mostly alternate through all four senior sisters and the two daughters/cousins. Each one looks back at how her life — both in New York and in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic — has been shaped by her gift and her family and how these matrilineal powers cause them to walk through the (male-dominated) world. If you like family sagas or immigrant stories and magical realism, I highly recommend Acevedo’s first novel for adults.
    

(more…)