It’s Monday - What are you reading? Housekeeping

I’ve been reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

It is a poem of a book devastating and beautiful, about life and loss and beauty. It has brought me to tears more than once. In Idaho, in the town of Fingerbone, two little girls grow up. Abandoned by their parents, they are raised first by their mystified grandmother, then by two dithering maiden great-aunts and finally by their mother’s transient sister who is incapable of housekeeping in a life so fragile and awash in the waters of memory. 

I’m also reading the first Harry Potter with my youngest son, who is ten. A different genre, of course, but he is also an orphan and threatened by wasting away, looking at his lost parents in a mirror.

This has got me to thinking - how many protagonists are orphans? I’ve counted quite a few. Why do you think this is?

Working on One Sentence in My Book

The flame haired man turned into a raven

His flaming hair sprouted black feathers

The flames of his hair shot into feathers of black

His head sprouted sable feathers that gleamed blue and green

sheen, light scattered, reflected blue, in the dim light, gleamed...

Arrrg! (I will not look at facebook, I will not look at facebook)

His flaming hair congealed into feathers

Hmm...potential, like blood? sour milk? He is a bad guy...I like the word purple

zersflj09r 23*& G (Molly the cat walks across the keyboard on her way to the windowsill)

His flaming hair congealed into sable feathers that reflected the dim light in a sheen of blues and greens and scattered purples that shimmered and gleamed

Too long…sigh...Oh look - It's snowing again. 

His flaming hair congealed into sable feathers. The dim light scattered over them in a sheen of purples, blue and green.

Hmm...but the color shifts - a shifting sheen…

Good enough for now, come back to it later.

O.K. next sentence -

March First

Today March comes in like a lion

Silent, it stalks in behind the fog

No roaring no flash

But the big cat, crouched 

Its baited breath draws

Precipitates from the mist

When I look again

Grains of snow dance without sound

The house cat walks across my hands 

to sit on the window sill

and stare, wide-eyed, at the world.