Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Poetry as a salve. What grief can teach. Dinner and theatrics in Branson, Missouri. The pleasures of learning a musical instrument and a behind-the-scenes look at The Fugitive.

1. Ahead of Time

Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words

Writer Kamran Javadizadeh’s sister, Bita, died a slow, agonizing death from cancer. Here, he writes about losing her through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from her reading of it in college; a Hafez verse that Bita herself texted to him one day. I adored this essay, a mix of personal history and literary analysis, and I also found it achingly familiar. Exactly 17 years ago this week, when I witnessed the sudden death of someone I loved, I was thrust into a private hell, a netherworld of despair. I struggled to connect with friends and family, and they with me. It was like I was trapped underwater, screaming, and they were looking down at me, unable to hear, much less help. Poetry, though, could breach the surface, offering me what I so desperately needed: a sense of empathy. I analyzed poems about death and mourning, pondering the words, meaning, and mechanics that made me feel the verses so deeply. Poems, as Javadizadeh reminds us in his essay about Bita, can be portals—to other people, to other planes, and even to ourselves. —SD

2. Mount Fear Diary

Joshua Hunt | The Believer | July 26, 2023 | 7,388 words

Struggling with how to grieve his Uncle Bill while on assignment in Japan, Joshua Hunt travels to Mount Fear, a place where the human and spirit world meet and one can go to console, pacify, and communicate with the dead. On the journey, Hunt begins to process his deep love and respect for the man who helped him navigate the trauma of his extended Tlingit family, a family Hunt distanced himself from while pursuing his writing career. Hunt’s faith and conviction in working through loss in words gives this piece life. He gives shape to the amorphous, ethereal, ever-shifting complexity of grief and grasps what it offers him: A chance to embrace his extended family in a new way. “Damp with sweat and rain, I wondered if the bus passengers could perceive the spirit walking with me,” he writes. “It had been there for eighty-five days, mute, but so real to me that I addressed it aloud. So real to me that the following week, while caught in a sudden downpour on the streets of Tokyo, I would burst into tears and thank it for the last gift it gave me: a sorrow deep enough to draw me back for the next funeral, and the next birthday, and all those other occasions when being together is more important than being free from pain.” At its core, this beautiful essay is not just about what grief takes, but what more importantly, what it can give. —KS

3. Dinner Theater and Loathing in Baptist Vegas

Amy McCarthy | Eater | August 2, 2023 | 3,258 words

I had never heard of Branson, Missouri, but after Amy McCarthy describes it as “either the Live Music Capital of the World or Baptist Vegas,” I wanted to know all about it. In Branson, “dinner theater” thrives, a phrase that for me conjures up shoveling down pasta at 5 p.m. before running to catch a show. But not in Branson. In Branson, show tunes come alongside your carbonara. McCarthy throws herself into this world, slurping soup in a 35,000-square-foot arena while watching “Dolly Parton’s Stampede,” complete with flashy costumes adorned with rhinestones, beautiful horses, and some problematic depictions of Native Americans. McCarthy is brilliant at conjuring the sights (and smells) that confront her, and I enjoyed her tepid reviews of the shows and food (particularly a desert that tasted “like the inside of a refrigerator”). But the essay really shines by analyzing what Branson actually is. Selling itself as a place for wholesome entertainment, this pretense of a “white, Christian, conservative utopia” is as thin as the cheerful veneer of the serving staff. Underneath Branson is a “huckster’s paradise” that sells God, guns, and country. I have now heard of Branson, but I don’t think I’ll go. —CW

4. What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

Jaron Lanier | The New Yorker | July 22, 2023 | 3,794 words

In the opening of this essay, Jaron Laniers sketches a scene of deep intimacy: His mother teaching him to play piano with her hands above his on the keys. I can imagine the touch of her hands on his, the pure and clear tones of the piano, and the joy that these moments of closeness, learning, and beauty must have brought him as a child before she was taken from him, killed in a car accident. These experiences formed a man with an insatiable appetite for musical instruments and the study of music itself, enjoyed in brief respites from other tasks throughout his day. “Holding an oud is a little like holding a baby,” he writes. “While cradling an infant, I feel pretensions drop away: here is the only future we truly have—a sacred moment. Playing the oud, I am exposed. The instrument is confessional to me.” As Lanier surveys his large instrument collection, he delights in the singular joy each invokes, recalling the muscles involved and the physical sensations that translate into their individual music. What I loved most about this piece is how Lanier thrills at moments of discovery in learning to make sounds, unshackled from expectation. “When I played my ‘U’/’V”’ xiao for the first time, I made the futile blowing sound familiar to beginning flutists,” he writes. “Eventually, though, I managed a few weird, false notes. I was surprised but also delighted. Some of my favorite moments in musical life come when I can’t yet play an instrument. It’s in the fleeting period of playing without skill that you can hear sounds beyond imagination.” You need not be a musician or rare instrument aficionado to love this story. Your heart will tell you it’s a piece that hits all the right notes. —KS

5. ‘I Didn’t Kill My Wife!’ — An Oral History of ‘The Fugitive’

Andy Greene | Rolling Stone | July 29, 2023 | 12,243 words

If you’ve watched The Fugitive more times than you can count—and let’s face it, you have—you probably think of the 1993 movie as a perfectly crafted thriller. Not so much, it turns out! As Andy Greene’s oral history makes clear, the classic result belies the seat-of-the-pants execution. A star who was convinced the film would tank his career. A screenplay that never got finished. An ensemble actor who constantly found ways to maximize his screen time. A cast member who fell out after most of the movie had already been shot (and, consequently, a janky fake beard). A climax that was plotted on set. Dialogue that, seemingly more often than not, came straight from the ever-fizzing brain of Tommy Lee Jones. As much as I usually despise the word, this story officially qualifies as “rollicking.” Harrison Ford may not have participated, but Greene’s reporting ensures that his presence is still felt, whether laughing over the movie’s impending dud status or inviting Sela Ward to improv their scenes together on the fly. At this rate, every movie is going to get an oral history on every major anniversary, and I regret to inform you that next year marks 30 years since Ernest Goes to School and 3 Ninjas Kick Back. Then again, as long as those inevitable pieces aim to replicate the good vibes and rich details of this one, there’s no such thing as too many. —PR

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Audience Award

Here’s the piece our readers could not resist this week:

Fahrenheit 105: Why I No Longer Love the Texas Heat

Forrest Wilder | Texas Monthly | July 27, 2023 | 1,727 words

You expect heat in Texas, but Forrest Wilder remembers a far more forgiving climate growing up than the one he is experiencing now. A personal microcosm of climate change that really brings reality home. —CW

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Beirut, at Sunset

Tamara Saade’s beautiful essay attempts to make order and meaning from the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut in 2020.

It took time until I was ready to watch sunsets again. On the day of the explosion I had looked up at the sky, and seen a pink, orange, and white mushroom cloud. Like many Lebanese, I began experiencing PTSD symptoms in the months following the explosion. When the sky would turn warmer, and I’d see a color palette reminiscent of the sunset, I would get anxious, trying to avoid it. I used to love sunsets. I would chase them across the city, one of the first subjects I learned to photograph. When I lost my father at twelve years old, I grieved by walking the sadness away in the streets of Beirut, looking in the small alleys of my city for the security a parent would provide. I tried to capture sunsets through the lens of the camera I carried everywhere. They were my northern star, my anchor in such an ephemeral life. But August fourth robbed me of the comfort I had always found in the colors of Beirut’s sunsets. I was not alone. So many of us lost what we’d clung to for a sense of stability and safety. Since the explosion, I feel as if I am grieving all over again, mourning the loss of the city that is my home. 

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The Struggle Is Awesome

If you’re a runner who also browses TikTok, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of @mrs.space.cadet, a.k.a. Erin Azar, a 39-year-old mother of three who’s taken the running world by storm. Her quirky, lighthearted videos have inspired amateurs and Olympians alike. Unlike other fitfluencers, though, it’s Erin’s relatable, real-life, unglamorous approach to the sport that makes her content so appealing. In this delightful and uplifting Runner’s World profile, Jill Waldbieser gets to the heart of what motivates Azar. As an amateur (and very occasional) runner myself, I’ve never felt more validated.

“People see someone who’s not super skinny and think they must be running to lose weight,” she says. “They’ll comment to the effect of, ‘You’ve been running for three years and you look the same.’” But Erin’s goal is health, physical and mental, not a certain physique or number on the scale. When she did focus on weight loss, running didn’t bring her any joy. “Eating pizza and drinking beer made me happy, so I decided to just be happy.” Besides, she adds, “you can’t train for a marathon and try to lose weight. You have to eat so much.”

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Taken and Told

Lucy Sexton and Joe Sexton| The Atavist Magazine |July 2023 | 1,233 words (5 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 141, “Held Together.”

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Becoming a single dad ended my sportswriting career; I couldn’t make a West Coast swing during baseball season while responsible for two young girls. So I moved to the Times’ metro desk and became a decent city reporter, doing a mix of hard news and feature stories. Over the years, my girls tagged along on some of my assignments, from the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island to a Hasidic mother in Brooklyn who was one of the most sought-after nitpickers during a plague of lice in local schools. When the Times asked me to help conduct in-house seminars on street reporting, I made a point of telling younger reporters that success is often determined before you get out the door. If you’re fatalistic about getting what you need, failure awaits. If you force yourself to believe that an improbable reporting coup could happen, often as not it does. Corny maybe, but also true, at least in my experience.

The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

I felt naive, then, when two members of our team returned to the Royal Gardens after venturing out to Al Mabani. Their driver had refused to even slow down while passing by the jail, so fearful was he of being stopped at gunpoint.

I followed my own advice with Libya, trying before I arrived to imagine what reporting there would be like. I foresaw secretive conversations with friends and relatives of jailed migrants in dusty streets outside detention facilities. Maybe there would be a way to talk to prisoners through barred windows. Notes might be exchanged.

Needless to say, the landscape of the city was less than ideal for the kind of street reporting I knew. To merely venture out, by foot or by car, was to risk being confronted by the armed men stationed at a convoluted pattern of checkpoints throughout Tripoli. And then there was the matter of our security team. Though they had been assigned to us with the help of the Red Crescent, a little googling showed that the firm they worked for seemed to be run by a former Libyan military official accused of war crimes. Were they actually government minders monitoring our doings? Militia members themselves? Did it matter?

Libya, I was discovering a little late, was an inscrutable place.

In addition to me and Ian Urbina, our team included Dutch documentary filmmaker Mea Dols de Jong and Pierre Kattar, a video journalist who’d spent years at The Washington Post. Against the odds, we soon got some reporting breaks. A variety of aid organizations had done years of work documenting abuses and offering comfort to the tens of thousands of migrants swept up and detained inside Libya. One of those organizations was able to provide us with the names of the young migrant shot dead at Al Mabani and of a witness to the killing. The dead man was Aliou Candé, a farmer and father of three from Guinea-Bissau, captured by the Libyan Coast Guard as he tried to make his way to a new life in Italy. The witness was a man from Ivory Coast named Mohammad David; he had managed to escape Al Mabani in the tumult that followed Candé’s murder. We had a cell phone number for him.

On our first night in Tripoli, three of us made it to Gargaresh, an area that had become a migrant ghetto. Militias liked to make brutalizing sweeps of Gargaresh’s mix of hideouts and encampments. Along the neighborhood’s main drag, a blur of neon lights, furtive figures, internet cafés, and cheap food joints, we met Mohammad David. He spoke French, and Pierre, whose father once served as a translator for the U.S. embassy in Paris, could make out enough of what he said to extract a rough narrative of Candé’s killing.

There had been a fight inside one of Al Mabani’s crowded, fetid cells. Guards fired their automatic rifles indiscriminately. Candé was struck in the neck, and his blood streaked a wall as he dragged against it before falling down dead. Other detainees didn’t allow his body to be removed from the cell until they were granted their freedom, which was how Mohammad David made it to Gargaresh.

The incident was a stark reminder that Al Mabani, like many other jails in Libya, was run by one of the violent militias that had divided Tripoli into wary, sometimes warring fiefs. These forces extort the families of jailed migrants for ransom payments, steal aid money meant to help feed and clothe their captives, and sell men and women into forced servitude. Candé’s killing, for a rare, brief moment, gave some of his fellow prisoners leverage over their captors.

In the days that followed our conversation with David, other unlikely reporting triumphs piled up. We found a man who served as a kind of informal liaison for migrants from Guinea-Bissau eking out a living in Tripoli. He brought us to Candé’s great-uncle, who showed us police documents pertaining to Candé’s death; a “fight” was listed as the cause of his demise. The liaison said that Candé had been buried in a vast walled-off expanse of dirt that served as the graveyard of Tripoli’s unwanted. We hired a local photographer to launch a drone camera over the acres of burial mounds, most of them unmarked. He managed to locate one into which someone had scratched the name “Candé.”

In subsequent days, our team snuck two other men who’d spent time at Al Mabani into our hotel. One of them, a teenager, told us that he’d taken a bullet in his leg the night Candé was killed. We pushed the limits of prudence in pursuit of these reporting coups. Pierre had brought a drone camera with him, which he flew above Al Mabani. The scene he captured looked a lot like a concentration camp: men huddled under threat of violence after being fed in a courtyard, then marched back to their cells single file, beaten in the head for so much as looking up at the sky.

It soon became clear that our security guys were reporting back to their bosses, whoever they were, at least some of what we were up to. At one point, we got a visit from an American expatriate who said she worked for the security outfit. She warned us that what we were doing was dangerous and demanded we apprise her of any further proposed reporting efforts outside the confines of the hotel.

One morning we notified Red Crescent officials that we wanted to visit the morgue where Candé’s body had been taken. Mea and I got in a van and made our way through Tripoli’s streets. The morgue was part of a complex of squat buildings shielded by an imposing set of walls and fences. Inside was a man at a desk. We asked to see Candé’s records, and he rifled through several filing cabinets.

A freshly wrapped body lay on a gurney in the middle of the main room. In a side room, a worker ran water from a hose over another body. Behind a set of curtains was a wall of refrigerated chambers that could hold perhaps two dozen corpses. It was impossibly hot and completely quiet.

Mea recorded what we were seeing from a small camera set discreetly against her stomach, until someone noticed and reported it to the man at the desk. It was time for us to go.

Read the full story at The Atavist

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‘We Have Fire All Around Us and We Can’t Get Out’

Last October, the Bolt Creek Fire helped give Seattle the worst air quality in the world—a dubious distinction more and more North American locations are getting in recent years. While the fast-moving blaze destroyed thousands of acres, no human lives were lost. But two very nearly were. Matt Bishop and Steve Cooper escaped certain death; this is the story of how.

Halfway down the chute, Bishop and Cooper watched in horror as the fire, hungry for fuel, snaked its way around the backside of the ridge and emerged in front of them. Flames engulfed the trail below the gully, consuming their escape route, roaring like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. “Oh fuck,” Cooper said. “That came fast, dude.” “Hopefully you guys get to see this video,” Bishop added, brow furrowed. “Otherwise, we didn’t make it.” He sent another message to his wife: “We’re trapped.”

Their breathing short and shallow, they considered their only option: Scramble back up the scree they’d just descended to huddle below Baring Mountain’s jagged peak, the rocky, open space a potential refuge — or a dead end.

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Dinner Theater and Loathing in Baptist Vegas

Amy McCarthy combines a fun look at “Dinner Theater” shows with thoughts on the more sinister side of the tourist town that hosts them. You’ll find playful descriptions and disturbing concepts in this compelling essay.

Still, I was aware that the Branson of today has a decidedly mixed reputation. Those who love it say that it’s a wholesome destination for good, clean, Christian fun in the Ozark Mountains, while its critics would suggest that it’s a haven for aging white baby boomers who are clinging to their God, their guns, and their wistfulness for a bygone era. In the midst of a 35,000-square-foot arena on the city’s theater-packed Strip, Dolly Parton’s Stampede is proof that it’s both — and a whole lot more.

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‘I Didn’t Kill My Wife!’ — An Oral History of ‘The Fugitive’

With apologies to The Shawshank Redemption, The Fugitive might be the greatest Aimless Sunday Afternoon Basic Cable Rewatch of all time. Is it Harrison Ford’s greatest? Nope. But it is a functionally perfect action-drama movie. And yet, it might actually be outshined by this doozy of an oral history—which, for all its lack of Harrison Ford, delivers more “how have I never heard that before?” details per square inch than seems possible. Read it, then watch the movie again. You were going to anyway, right?

Tom Wood: There’s a scene where we’re all sitting on the side of the train-wreck demolition site. We were questioning the dialogue and saying, “Let’s spark this up a bit.” I’m not the fastest thinker and was caught a little off-guard. Tommy turns to me [with the cameras rolling] and says, “What are you doing?” I go, “I’m thinking.” He goes, “How about you think me up a cup of coffee and a chocolate donut with some of those little sprinkles on top?” Later on, at the hotel scene, he says to me, “Don’t let them give you shit about your ponytail.” That was completely improv’d.

Daniel Roebuck: The quote that everyone brings up to me is “If they can dye the river green today, why can’t they dye it blue the other 364 days of the year?” That was an improv. And that was because we had that huge walk that we had to cover. And I remember asking Andy, “Did you shoot the green river?” He goes, “Yeah, we’re cutting it in.” And that’s how it came to be.

Joe Pantoliano: When we first get into the storm drain, I go, “Goddammit, I just got these shoes.” All the lines down there were improvised.

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The Land Beyond the Drug War

Inconsistent potency makes doing fentanyl—already up to 50 times stronger than heroine—like playing a game of Russian roulette. Will you get the dose you can tolerate or will you take the hit that leads to overdose? For Esquire, Jack Holmes reports from Portland in Oregon, a state which decriminalized drug possession via Measure 110 in an attempt to treat drug abuse as a behavioural-health disorder.

This was black tar heroin’s last stand,” Morgan told me, referring to the I-5 corridor from Washington to California. These days, she sits on the Oversight and Accountability Council for Measure 110, but years ago she was deep into heroin herself. She was in and out of jail for a long time, including four years on a federal charge when she was held responsible for her friend’s overdose death, but going to prison over and over never did much to stop her using. She was shocked at what she found in Portland when she got out in 2018, as a longtime housing shortage gave way to an explosion of tent cities. Then the state saw a surge in heroin and prescription-opioid use in 2019 and 2020, the culmination of a shift in which Portland’s beaming openness to the world began to fade toward something darker. Then the fentanyl flooded in, and now everything is fentanyl. It has almost completely replaced heroin on the street. A serviceable amount costs three dollars.

The true harm reductionists know that the material aid is about establishing a connection, planting a seed that you have to go back to the garden and tend to week after week until someone starts to believe for the first time in however long that somebody cares what happens to them, that maybe they should care, that they can’t just keep saying none of this shit matters so why not keeping getting high.

Everybody in this field has their own ways to navigate the philosophical quandaries, and nobody getting money through Measure 110 is pretending they have all the answers. Is the solution “housing first,” even before somebody gets sober, or do you give people medication and the supplies to keep living on the streets, hoping they can get clean in a tent? And considering all the many years when patients—especially Black patients—were thrown out of traditional inpatient programs so hastily, how do you decide when and why to toss somebody for screwing up?

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Revisiting My Rastafari Childhood

In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, How to Say Babylon, poet Safiya Sinclair recounts her upbringing in Jamaica—a life under livity, to use the argot of her parents’ adoptive Rastafarian tradition. (The culture, so often flattened by others into the stuff of dorm room posters, is rendered here with both nuance and clarity.) As Sinclair finds her own voice, her father retreats into the comforts of parochial repression; that tension propels readers through a happy but fraught adolescence and out the other side.

My father was never going to be a carpenter or a banker or a taximan, he said. He sang for Jah, so he had no choice but to cover the same ten Bob Marley songs for tourists eating their steak dinners in the west-coast hotels. At home, though, he could still be king. My mother placed every meal before him as soon as he beckoned for it. He had never turned on a stove, never washed a dish. Every evening before he left for work, my mother would wash his dreadlocks, pouring warm anointments over his bowed head at the bathroom sink, and then oil each lock as he sat eating fruit that she had cut for him. I imagined a servant, just out of frame, fanning a palm frond back and forth.

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Everything You Never Knew About Competitive Eating

Jamie Loftus’ piece on competitive eating is wonderful goodie bag full of surprises. Sit down at the table and allow her to serve you up a platter full of fascinating and admirable characters who are using their profile to advance meaningful causes.

It’s mid-July, and by now, the professional eating world is well into its 51 weeks of annual obscurity.

Their introductions are carefully crafted WWE-grade nightmare fuel, announced as if each competitor is a god come down from the heavens to vacuum meat tubes down their gullets. The intros for these lesser known eaters are largely drowned out by color commentary about the main competitors—still, there they are, forming the outer edges of a Last Supper–style tableau, each with their own stats and training processes and very specific traumas.

What if I were to tell you these are, by far, the most interesting characters in the professional eating world?

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Coach’s Kid

A reflection on a father and son relationship told through the sports that they played together. There are some unflinching and harrowing recollections, but they are told with insight and understanding.

What made us such mysteries to each other? Probably the fact that we didn’t talk about much besides sports. Other topics weren’t explicitly off-limits; Dad simply had little to say about them. Plus we both tended to sink into silent, solitary pastimes: me with my trading cards, pop music, and video games, and Dad with his computer.

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Ahead of Time

A beautiful meditation on the loss of a beloved sister to a long, slow battle with cancer, braided with poems the writer read during that experience:

Before a person dies, you talk to them. They die, and you still want to talk to them. But their body is gone. When my sister would come home from college, I would sometimes go into her room and just sit there, hoping she would ask me about what felt at the time to me like the major dramas of my life (I would have been four­teen, fifteen). I was too shy to raise them with her. Now she was drifting away and I was in that same room, holding a book of hers from those same years, her notes inside, and all I could do was read to myself.

The touchingly literal conceit of the Olds poem is that death is like this: a problem of a body having gone missing. You face some­body when you talk to them; if their body is gone, and you wish to go on talking, you must search for a new way of facing them. The poem elaborates this hypothesis, testing it out. The speaker turns to a “new rose,” only to realize that at night we can’t see color, leav­ing the lawn “grey,” the rose “glowing white.” Has the poem found a new way of seeing in the dark, or has grief drained all color from the world?

The desire to talk to the dead requires the “as if” of figurative language: a descent from the world of the living to an underworld. As the poet addresses the absent grandmother, she conjures her into the poem, and yet what appears is a person who had already, even in life, turned toward the darkened state of death: not knitting, not reading. The only unbroken lines in the poem are its final ones, in which the speaker seems to have reconciled herself to having noth­ing more than the imperfect, residual knowledge that death allows.

At the heart of the poem, though, lies a terrible doubt. “Are the dead there / if we do not speak to them?” If our speech is what has seemed to grant others their presence in the first place, have we been fooling ourselves all along? Have we mistaken the projection of our own imagination, reflected back to us at night, for a dim impres­sion of the person whom we miss? “Why do I tell you these things?” John Ashbery asks at the end of one poem. “You are not even here.”

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How I Became a Modern Bootlegger

A blisteringly honest account of the thrill of the drug business. It’s not all about money, it’s about avoiding the “mind-numbing, soul-destroying drudgery at the jobs that are available to you.”

It would be more noble to say that I smuggled drugs out of economic desperation, but that’s not true. I liked the rush. I also liked the people I dealt with, and the exposure to the human condition. Even after 25 years in journalism, I never knew humanity the way I did working at a strip club and moving product. In the dark, you see people close up. You learn who has a good soul and whose is muddy. You have to trust your gut. People will show themselves to you and it’s important that you listen.

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What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

For The New Yorker, technologist Jaron Lanier delights in his large collection of musical instruments and the singular and ephemeral joy of music made in collaboration with others.

Today, I love to have musicians over to my house, where we can combine different instruments to see what happens. The joy that transpires when things go well is multilayered. There is the pleasure of connection with other people, and there is also the happiness of finding a new little corner of aesthetic interiority together. Music can conjure a new flow, a new pattern, a new flavor, between and inside people. And playing sufficiently obscure instruments forces a different approach to music. How can you be competitive about raw skill, or get into some other macho trap, when the task at hand is so esoteric? Who is to judge the winner in a contest that must invent itself over and over? When music made collaboratively with other musicians goes right, I feel a budding, rising warmth and comfort. Is this my mother smiling on me? Or maybe it’s me, smiling on her.

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Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
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