On the painfully slow days where the clouds seem glued to the sky and the trees move not a whisper, Germany feels very far away. Days in this small town are very slow. Putting cookies into a freshly-washed mason jar can be the highlight of my day. Falling through ice into a puddle of mud is the most interesting thing that's happened to me all week. And I've been wondering recently, if this is why we're so dependent on love. Our lives seem devoid of romanticism, so we go for something romantic is nature. Obviously being with a loved one makes the real world fall away. As Austen mentions in Sense and Sensibility, you're in a relationship, and you smile down on everyone else with pity, because you are experiencing bliss in a way they never will. Life is simply better with love.
The love doesn't have to be for a person. Society tries so hard to tell us that the perfect relationship is all we need. But this relationship can be between woman and book, child and sparkling grey rock, old man and the mountain air. Society tells us also, quite often, that such relationships are unhealthy. A book can't love us back. This is entirely false. A book is perfectly capable of giving more love and support than some people ever can. If the object fascinates, invites curiosity, or makes the world seem a bit brighter, than the object is half of the relationship making this life worth living.
All life is worth living, but it's the bright lives that are worth the most. The lives with the memories, the books, the sparkling grey rocks, and the mountain air--these are the lives with the relationships and the love. We need something to make the tedium of the slow days a bit more worthwhile. If this solace is found in a book rather than a person, all the more power to the person strong enough to make life interesting through their own means and imagination.
Sometimes I think I need to be back in the city. Not simply New York or a dirty new American city, but one of European tastes, where there's a Romanesque church on every corner and a museum on every street in between. I do miss Europe; I do miss Germany. But sometimes I think that that's having love too easy. Life is a lot of hard work, and Germany was a gift of time that allowed me to see what life could be like without the work. If I had infinite money and infinite time, I could have gone on living in Germany forever. But life means working, maybe earning money, or at least earning enough to keep oneself going. Returning to the slow tedium of life in small-town Pennsylvania reminds me of this. It reminds me I need to work harder; I need to find my solace in books. Perhaps I even need a break from trying to find love in people.
I traveled to Alabama before I discovered that life could be so easy, and I was shocked at how difficult life was in this beautiful southern state. Under all the Spanish moss and brilliantly-crisp starry nights lurks a lot of poverty. The true beauty of the state, however, is in the people who find love regardless. They work to create better schools, to devote themselves to religion, or to make a living in small, self-owned businesses. I was in one such business, a tiny boutique just beside an old house that had been converted into a bookstore, when I came across the most gorgeous grey coat. I tried it on, fell and love, and went to the cashier to pay. She still had hand-written receipts, and she always wrote down the location from which all of her customers came. I told her Pennsylvania, and she seemed surprised to find someone from out of state. She didn't know how to spell the state. I could tell she was embarrassed. I was too, because I couldn't tell her the proper spelling.
I'm still not sure that I would be comfortable spelling the word on a piece of paper, without the modern device known as spell checking. To be fair, it does look quite strange. Sometimes I try to remember Sylvia, and it helps me with the ending.
But we don't need spelling to be good. We don't need spelling to be in love. And if we look in the right places, sometimes love can help us with all that we need. Even if that means spelling.
(I don't want to stop writing. My hands are flying over the keys and the words feel beautiful.)
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