Rain kept us indoors for the better part of today, where we read stories, and Portable Hair Dryer Girl hosted a little tea party. We also watched the old scary-funny Vincent Price film, "The Tingler". Which was superb. We read selections from "The Outermost House" by Henry Beston. If you like nature writing, this is a true classic. We read a lot of nature writing, so if you have any titles to share, please do.
Beston spends a year alone in a tiny cottage on a remote beach in 1926. Close to the end of the book he writes:
"Had I room in this book, I would like to write a whole chapter on the sense of smell, for all my life long I have had of that sense an individual enjoyment. To my mind, we live too completely by the eye. I like a good smell - the smell of a freshly ploughed field on a warm morning after a night of April rain, the clovelike aroma of our wild Cape Cod pinks, the morning perfume of lilacs showery with dew, the good reek of hot salt grass and low tide blowing from these meadows on summer afternoons."
The book is filled with a wonder and respect for sea, sky, wind and sand. There are migrating birds, various animals, and a dramatic shipwreck. I love his winter descriptions of the beach.
