Summer reading: an epilogue...

Last Sunday around 4:40PM on a day of drenching rains from a series of haphazard thunderstorms…

Hallelujah, Praise be to the Good Lord, and !!!sruoY pU, to the Signora Neighbor Lady in the Ugly Yellow House, who has never vacillated in keeping our access to water OFF in saving Nature’s H2O by allowing it to simply run down the stream, into the Aullela River and off into the Mediterranean Sea…

I satisfactorily closed the third and last book of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, on Sir Thomas Cromwell.

I was WRONG. Every single one of the 912 pages in the book… written as nine hundred and twelve pages from Ms. Mantel’s suspected literary penchant for writing it all out and then some… were necessary in telling The Story. Quite a feat. Exhausting. But, a feat.

I found the ending of the last two chapters moving, brilliantly written, a quite believable rendition of one person’s steady progression in confronting his imminent end. Conversations, interrogations, contemplations, actions slowly degenerate into a whirl of grasping for the last sensations and thoughts before the fall of the axe. I felt bereaved by Cromwell’s death, by his now absence, so long a presence endured over the four and a half months I struggled to read the book. I was not originally keen on it. I am now. I may start all over again.

The stack of other books awaiting my attention are distributed on two night tables next to the bed nel’Appartamento Azzurro, where The Dog & I are camped out during our Summer 2020 House Improvements Project, still an on-going affair. Blocked for two weeks, there was a rush of activity last Monday followed by nothing on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, a workman came and spent two afternoons diligently working. Now today, this Thursday, nothing again. We hope for a gainful return of activity on Friday afternoon. Rome may not have been built in a day but, I betcha it didn’t take as long as that which we have embarked upon at il Poggiolo. May the Good Lord speed the work a pace. Let us pray?