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When I step into Mum and Dad’s house, I am greeted by the ever-familiar smell of home. Each house has its own unique scent; a combination of washing powder, perfumes, aftershaves, shower gels, cooking… but also something less tangible.
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This is how it always remains, even when the house and the lives lived together as a family have been lost in the marching forward of relentless time. Something will trigger a sensory memory and one is back opening the door of the familiar and breathing in the love and affection held within its walls.
“He sat down and picked up a pen. He looked at the photograph of him and his brother just after they’d joined up, and words that had so long evaded his mouth now gathered at the nib of his pen, and he wrote down everything he felt and everything he could see. He wrote to Peace once a week between their courting, and what he couldn’t get down on paper that first week he continued into the second week, then the third. He wrote sitting on a harbour bench, he wrote at the tiller of his boat. Peace got to know her fisherman through his letters. And when they met up she made him read them out loud, so that the words that had gathered at the nib of his pen found their rightful place upon his tongue. 47”
― A Year of Marvellous Ways
― A Year of Marvellous Ways
“The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.”
― Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen
― Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen
“No paradise without a snake.”
― Your Story, My Story
― Your Story, My Story
“He remembered how Michael had bragged that he could swim, but he couldn’t. He said that he’d read everything about swimming, firmly believing he could trip across words, like stepping stones, to the bank of experience. But he couldn’t. It would take another summer before Michael would learn to swim. But he floated, though. Face down in the river with his arms and legs out wide, and people watched, and sometimes their laughter turned to panic when they saw little sign of movement. Dead-Man’s Float, he”
― Tin Man
― Tin Man
“suffering from an avalanche of depression; we’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, and yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high, and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective. Sometimes, the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one: we need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on in there; that sometimes, everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it, and to be kind. To find our own grit, in our own time.”
― Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen
― Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen
Jan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
549 books
|
66 friends
1,134 books
|
138 friends
1 book
|
21 friends
600 books
|
4 friends
7 books
|
25 friends
5 books
|
19 friends
1 book
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67 friends
405 books
|
2 friends
More friends…
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