1. I didn't get a lot of sleep either Saturday night, after driving home with Debbie from the Spokane airport, or on Sunday night when I was up Monday morning at 4:30 to get myself ready to drive to Spokane for blood work.
So, today, I slept from time to time, cat naps, and did my best to return to a sound sleep/awake balance.
2. As I continue to read my way through the Leah Sottile list of books, I finished Yellow Bird and decided to stay in North Dakota and read a novel from her list that is set among Ojibwe people on what I think is a reservation patterned after the Turtle Mountain Reservation, but, unless I'm mistaken, the novel, The Round House, doesn't name the reservation and I do believe the town of this story, Hoopdance, is fictional. If you know I'm mistaken, please let me know.
It's deeply satisfying to be reading a Louise Erdrich novel again. Her first three books, Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks were central to the philosophy/composition courses Rita Hennessy and I team taught about thirty years ago.
As I started reading The Round House so much that I love about Louise Erdrich's work came back to me. She writes elegant and detailed prose lyrically and beautifully. She creates full characters about whom we learn more and more details that deepen our sense of their humanity and complexity. Maybe above all, Erdrich is a superb story teller, blending the difficulties, even the horrors, of Ojibwe day to day life with humor and her characters' goodwill.
The novel's narrator is Joe, a teenager.
In the book's first chapter, Joe and his father find Joe's mother in a near catatonic state in her car, bleeding, bruised, and traumatized. They learn she was raped.
As the story develops, Joe is determined to do all he can, along with the adults in his life, to find the perpetrator of this attack.
I'm about a hundred pages in and I'm gripped.
3. I didn't realize until today, when I read Christy's Facebook post, that the entree she prepared for family dinner was a casserole. Well, she sent Debbie and me home Monday night with a nice helping of her dish and tonight I heated it up for our dinner and it tasted even better a day later. I also heated up a few leftover chicken wings from Sunday and the leftover bulgar, spinach, chickpea side dish I fixed for Monday.
Everything tasted great on Monday, but somehow, tonight, I thought the flavors of the casserole and my side dish had matured and tasted even better a day later!
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