Why did I include a bookshelf on this blog? Before I learned to simply sit and watch the world go by, I never stepped onto the porch without a book. Summer afternoons after what we called dinner, Grandad slept in the hammock while I raced through escapades of Nancy Drew Girl Detective, or Cherry Ames Student Nurse.  With mid-teens came gooey Janet Lambert books followed by the overwrought likes of GWTW and Root out of Dry Ground. I spent high school summers with books I wasn’t anxious for my grandparents to see: Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Group.  In no way did I understand those books, but I sensed they were Important To Read.

Alpine was often cooler than the rest of Texas in the summers, so sitting outside midday was not uncomfortable. Indoors, Grandmother watched her show, As the World Turns, knitting needles flying while she kept one eye on the television.  We all look for something that will transport us, take us away from the humdrum, and that was her  escape of choice. Mine was books. Grandad’s was sleeping on a hammock–under three layers–big sky, fat clouds, and West Texas pecan trees.

The long and pleasant summer day left no time to think seriously about much of anything, and in my head pooled memories I had not actually experienced, but gleaned from the books I devoured. This mental collection of not-my-real-memories gives me definite ideas about what makes a story transporting.   Now, I spend hours looking at Goodreads and online book reviews trying to find that page-turner you can get lost in. 

The latest such transporting book I encountered was penned by Barbara Kingsolver: Flight Behavior.  I haven’t loved everything Kingsolver has written, but this novel was full of writerly tricks that resonate. Situated in a world I’ve never seen, this book made me want to visit Appalachia, of all places.  And poor Appalachia at that. She captured all this with a whip smart narrator in the grand tradition of all girl heroes I used to adore. Juxtaposed against a totally fiction construct of Monarch Butterflies wintering in Appalachia, Kingsolver painlessly leads us to conclude that the threat to the Monarch is just as great as the threat that a brilliant mind may languish and never see its potential.

These are the thoughts as I look at the Davis Mountains, not the Appalachians, and hummingbirds, not butterflies, while I wonder if the Monarchs will make it here for another  fall.

 Video from the annual Butterfly Release sponsored by Faith Hospice, Dallas,  April 28, 2013.