Avenue Handmade

This week’s RR is brought to you by books–actual, tangible, smellable, hardbound books. ‘Cause I went to the library this week. And we’re off:

From the introduction to Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss: “Part of one’s despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation.” I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve read this book. I feel like it was written by my soulmate. It’s glorious.

From a book that makes me alternately sad, mad, and in awe of both the native beauty of my home state and the blindness of profit-seeking developers to that beauty: “Florida is for sale, has been for a while now, and it makes me sad as hell. I’ll stay as long as I can, but one day soon it will all go: the marsh wrens and the butterflies, the cactus and blackberry vines, the old Cracker house, the feeling. And I wonder if the hawk should ever come back, just on a random flyover one day, singing its high, sweet whistle way up in the sky, if anyone here where this dirt street once was will even remember the kind of bird he is, or care enough to stop, just for a moment, and smile.” (Losing it All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape, by Bill Belleville) Check out his blog.

Tune in next week…maybe I’ll read a newspaper!