Shadowchild by P.F. Thomese

What a beautiful book this is.  I have only read a few pages but already I want to read more by P.F. Thomese, a Dutch writer whose little girl died when she was a few weeks old.  The book was published in 2005, in a translation from the original published in 2003.  Here is an excerpt:

Does love disappear when the person disappears? Where does the love go when the body is burned to ashes? It flees into similes.  The body has been taken from the earth, but not all the things that remind you of it.

 "Thine eyes are like the ponds in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus. Thine head upon thee is like Carmel..."  Like, indeed, like, like. Love looks for an embodiment it can no longer find.

Narrowsburg

It is a quiet Sunday night in Narrowsburg, NY.  This morning Richard and I saw a scarlet tanager flying from branch to branch eating insects I guess.  All of the birds here seem to dine on insects for their main diet.  We have flycatchers, cedar waxwings, phoebes, kingbirds, catbirds.  There is also a ferocious mother hen wild turkey who doesn't fly or eat insects as far as I can tell; I have yet to see her chicks.

Elizabeth loved the peacefulness of this part of the state, and we miss her when we come here, but we remember how we used to sit together on the big front porch and read or paint, or watch the hummingbirds bomb each other on their way to the feeder.