Ben & Jen Shepard

The other evening I was cooking dinner in my kitchen when all the cool colors of the early evening inspired me to put down the spatula and pick up my camera. Only the blues and soft whites of pale dusk illuminated the room through windows lightly filtered by sheer curtains.  Surrounded by the basics of life, eggs, freshly chopped herbs, a loaf of bred, the mood was earthy and tranquil.  There was no one home but me.  Ahhh…peace.  The rare thing.

And lately for us it has been rare.  It seems as if June has hurled us into a flurry of non-stop activity. Every night of the week there’s somewhere to be.  And every day it is just as busy at work, especially for Ben.  We’re both feeling tired and strained.  But, we try to steal moments of illusive peace when we can.  This weekend and next we are celebrating our birthdays together.  We enjoyed dinner out tonight – a brick oven pizza and a glass of red wine – and next weekend we are planning a camping trip with some friends.  It will be nice to get away from the constant running for a time since both Ben and I seem to find balance through nature.  As I write this we are sitting on the porch listening to the rain.  Orange is on Ben’s lap while he is reading.  Every now and then the breeze sends a whiff of cilantro or thyme our way from the herbs growing in Terra Cotta pots.  I know this will only last until it is too dark to read, or too cold to enjoy the tapping of the rain.  But for now it is a peaceful snapshot in the midst of a restless season.  So I am enjoying it thoroughly.

A few nights ago Ben and I were outside enjoying a beautiful summer evening.  He was mowing the lawn while I was tending some of my vegetables.  It was just about the time of evening when the rabbits come out, and we have them aplenty in our neighborhood.  They’re not shy either.  On several occasions we’ve spotted a couple of them boldly chasing each other around someone’s front yard.  Sometimes we’ll see one sitting stone still in the middle of the grass like it thinks it’s invisible.  They don’t even really run away when we walk or drive by.  I think they are so cavalier because the houses in our neighborhood are so close together and there are so many dogs and cats that they are just used to all the company.  So, on this particularly warm evening, it didn’t really surprise me when we saw a rabbit hopping around the neighbor’s bushes despite the humming lawn mower.  It did surprise me though when Ben pointed out that it was actually a tiny little baby bunny, a rare sight even in spring where we live.  It was so cute!  But in a flash, it had disappeared into the greenery.  I smiled, and went back to the vegetables.

Only a few seconds later, I heard Ben hollering over the mower and then he was abandoning it and running toward the neighbor’s yard.  Suddenly, I saw something small and dark streak across the neighbor’s grass with Romeo in hot pursuit.  It was almost too late when we lept upon the scene, yelling and flailing, doing all we could to shoo the cat away.  Romeo startled and looked up at me with wide eyes, so incredibly confused by our bizarre behavior!  Clearly this was dinner!  Poor cat.  I did manage to get him into the house, bewildered and disappointed as he was.  Ben carefully scooped up the baby bunny and looked him over for injuries.  No serious ones, thank goodness.  Ben’s rescue was just in time.  The little one was only inches from a Discovery-Channel-worthy death.  After a few minutes (and some excitedly taken photographs on my part) we let him go into the bushes.  A good ending for bunny.

For the next several hours, the cats sat in the windowsill, gazing out into the empty yard, willing bunnies to appear.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

Feeling a bit experimental one day, I decided to bust out of my usual literary genres (historical novels, fantasy, funny pet books like Marley & Me) and I picked up the much-talked-about best-seller, Wicked.  Firstly,  I have to be honest.  I never really liked The Wizard of Oz.  For someone who so thoroughly enjoys delving into Middle Earth or exploring the Village of Hogsmeade, this a little surprising.  So  I was skeptical as to whether I would enjoy Wicked at all.

The results were varied.  This is a totally different Oz than the one I had seen in the 1939 film with Judy Garland.  I was not an outsider this time, blown in to a strange world on a tornado.  Instead, I experienced it as if I lived there along with a myriad of colorful characters.  Except that this did not make me an insider either.   Maguire never really connected me to Oz or to most of its inhabitants in a way that made it feel like a familiar place.  The only one I felt any sense of relation to was, as the title suggests, the Witch.  And even that was in a limited sense, although I wonder if it wasn’t purposeful.

The green-skinned protagonist is called Elphaba (a name which Maguire fashioned from the initials of Lyman Frank Baum, L-F-B, the original creator of Oz.) Elphaba is from the start a complex and polarized character.  She is both admirable and awful,  good and wicked.  She embodies the central question of this novel: what is the true nature of good and evil?

How the book goes about posing this question is not typical.  The writing style took some getting used to.  I noticed that although Elphaba is the main character, we rarely if ever get to know what she is thinking, which contributes to the disconnected feeling.  Usually the author gives the reader insight into the main character’s thoughts, which helps us sympathize with them, feel for them.  But that connection to Elphaba was always cut just a little short.  I found myself thinking I should feel for her – but no matter how intimate or provoking the circumstances, the emotions that should suitably follow were never allowed to fully develop.  There was always a detachment.  I’m not sure if Maguire meant it to be this way, but it made for a very different reading experience.

Overall I think I enjoyed this book.  I say “think” because the story was interesting and the perspective, the characters and the story-telling were very original.  It definitely lived up to my expectations for trying something outside of my usual genre box.  I was, however, glad to get my nose back into a historical novel.  Perhaps the old adage is true for books as well as love (and why not, for those who have a love of books): absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder.