The new book I'm reading is appropriate to the new place. I LOVE Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. I also very much enjoyed her readings and "workshop" at the Binghamton University Writing by Degrees conference. I had a brief conversation with her, as she signed my books (I also bought Four Spirits) about the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. She likes The Long Winter the best. I can't really decide which one I like the best...I think that the first one I read was Little House on the Prairie, and I know I must've read The Long Winter either as the second or third book. (I read them all out of order). I can remember being in third grade and I had just moved to Renton, Washington, from Latham, New York, and I was the only kid in my class who liked those books.

I got teased a little bit by a new friend I made at my school, Campbell Hill Elementary, which was a school that had not one, not two, but THREE recesses. She was called Cheryl, she was skinny with a square jaw with a large mole, and long blond hair, and her family was on welfare and used food stamps. I think that she and I were two white girls who hung out with a larger group of mostly black girls who played on the bars every recess. Not that I think I noticed it back then, so much, but just in my memory as an older person, I notice it now. I learned to
skin the cat, and to do "the pencil" and other things which I don't remember the names of, but I could describe what I did. I don't remember which one "skin the cat" was. "The pencil" was when you made your whole body as straight as a board and flipped over the bar backwards. "Cherry Bombs" were when you hung upside down and, no hands, swung around on your knees and flipped off a high bar and landed on your feet. I only did that one time, on a playground, when my mother's boyfriend was close by and spotting me.

Also, at Campbell Hill, I learned to jump double dutch and play tetherball. I think that the first time I ever saw the older girls jumping double dutch was on St. Patrick's Day, maybe. "I am Irish!" I remember a dark skinned girl saying, with a tone of irony, or self-mocking, the one who was jumping. I secretly decided that I wanted to learn how to "jump Irish."

I almost think I love this book as much as I loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books back then. A light house figures predominantly in the first part of the book, Ahab's Wife. Since Michigan is full of lighthouses, being on the Great Lakes, this seems very fitting...