Postcards from Katherine
Postcard #18: The Pleasures of Home
This fall I was going to travel a lot. I was going to walk the Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto while the maple leaves turned red. I was going to attend a terrific literary festival and spend a night on a houseboat in the backwaters of southern India.
IIt was exciting to contemplate, but life intervened and now I am not doing any of it. So I am a bit sad.
However, I decided to be positive about the change of plans. Just think how many shoeless venturings through security x-rays I have missed. And no need to be tearing open small foil bags of pretzels while breathing diesel air or waking up at 2 am convinced it is morning. I will not be rushing all the time during the weeks before and after. I sleep in my own bed, and, most of the time, I will not be reminded of my stubborn monolingualism.
And I now have three completely unexpected, glaringly empty weeks in my Google calendar. Wait, more than that! The clocks went back an hour on Sunday, so I had a bonus hour to think about how to spend my time. Here’s what I came up with.
November at home is great. Okay, it is book prize season, always a good time to leave town. But it is character-building to try to rise above the gossip. And not hard, especially when the leaves are crisp and golden and kickable on the sidewalks. Sunsets, which now begin at 4:30 in the afternoon, are rosy and visible through bare branches from my third-floor, west-facing office.
Speaking of my office, I decided to clean it out, throwing away old business cards and to-do lists from 2006. Yesterday, I even emptied my inbox and had the joy of running into messages like this: “May the Hero of my (latest) ‘Novel-That-Never-Gets-Finished’ f**k one of your Female Personages? In more than one way I am struck by her.”
That was from a guy in Holland. I thought I had deleted it, along with those “Baby Boomer’s Death Count” messages. Anyway, it’s gone now. The whole room looks better.
I have finally moved the research materials for The Ghost Brush (aka The Printmaker’s Daughter) into three bankers’ boxes and now enjoy clear space on my office floor. I need this space, as the pile of books, newspaper clippings and notebooks for my new novel is growing.
I’m so short of space that I’ve developed a thing where I put little piles of bathtub-steamed, pre-enjoyed mass-market paperbacks in a box under the tree in front of the house. It’s usually the nannies who stop to pick them up, women from other countries here on the domestic immigration ticket. When I see them, I come out and recommend; it’s my version of Goodreads. They are excited to have the books and probably wouldn’t have gone into a bookstore to buy them. Another great reader is our postwoman. She rang the bell today and said she was loving the selection she’d found in my pile. “One of them was even signed to you,” she said.
Whoops.
Of course the real bonus is I have time to write. That is a kind of travel, and there are no line-ups.
If you would like to receive these postcards, please click on the following link to send Katherine an email.
Postcards from Katherine: author@govier.com