It’s lovely and bright outside, warm but not too warm, and there are lots of birds singing this morning, possibly to celebrate such a perfect day. I’ve been cooking and baking up a storm this weekend, and I’ve got plenty of gardening to do, as well as trying to fit in a walk, so this will be a short post, as I’ve had a bit of a late start blogging today.
I read a wonderful book last week, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, by Laura Imai Messina. Yui is a young woman, a radio talk show host, who lost her three-year-old daughter and her mother in the devastating tsunami of March 2011. She has been unable to overcome the grief that haunts her every day, and goes through her life like a ghost. When grief is the topic of one of her shows, she learns of a “wind” phone, a phone booth where people come to speak to their deceased loved ones, and she decides to travel from Tokyo to Bell Gardia to see if this will help. Along the way, she meets Takeshi, a young man who has lost his wife and whose daughter has stopped speaking since her mother’s death. Together they complete their first pilgrimage to the phone booth, and thus begins a relationship that may help them both come to terms with their losses and begin living again. This novel was inspired by a real phone booth in Japan with a disconnected “wind” phone, a place where people can come and speak to their loved ones and hopefully find some kind of comfort. It was a lovely, gentle story that shows the many faces of grief, the unique ways individuals cope, and the incremental stages, the “baby steps”, that lead to healing and acceptance. It was also a love story, an exploration into the need for connection with others, despite all the uncertainties. It spoke of both sadness and joy, despair and hopefulness, and I would highly recommend this heartwarming novel to just about anyone.
That’s all for today. Get outside and enjoy the wonderful day!
Bye for now…Julie
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