Where were you when you read it for the first time?

I’m assuming you read it more than once. Pretty much everybody I know has. To Kill a Mockingbird is now fifty years old. I was ten or eleven when I read it for the first time, and I loved it so much I can still tell you exactly what I wore (plaid pedal pushers) and ate (orange double popsicles), what the air felt like around me (hot) and the glimmer of the flashlight losing battery power as I stayed up extra late to finish. I remember staring at the tree on the cover and trying to picture the characters. I loved Scout. She talked and thought like me, and Atticus reminded me of my dad. I had never heard of rape before, and didn’t realize it was sexual until years later. Racial prejudice did not exist in my town in upstate New York, so it all seemed very exotic and tense to me. But Scout felt so real to me. I’ve read this book several times through the years, and there’s always something new to discover.

(photo: www.time.com)
It was the only novel she ever published. A tough act to follow. She dedicated her life to books and education, and now lives in New York City and Monroeville, Alabama. I think the only person who has her number is Oprah.

Here is the summary from Writers’ Almanac:

My parents have been married for 55 years.

How the heck did they do it?

 

29 May 1954

 

still smiling 55 years later

Writing better than I can

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

–Ernest Hemingway

 

I nearly forgot a career milestone this month. It’s the tenth anniversary of my first book with Mira Books, my current publisher. The Lightkeeper was a seaswept, Beauty-and-the-Beast-style romantic epic that takes place on the Washington coast in the 1870s. The setting is literally the ends of the earth, on the Long Beach peninsula at the mouth of the Columbia River, an area notorious for raging seas and terrible shipwrecks. The original title of this book was The Edge of Forever, a title I still love (and a tribute to the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever”), but The Lightkeeper is probably stronger and definitely more straightforward.

The Cape Disappointment lighthouse still stands. When we visit this area, we love to stay at the dog-friendly Lighthouse (where else?) or the Klipsan Beach Cottages. A walk through Oysterville is a trip back through time. Every time I go there, I feel like writing stories misted in spindrift. It’s a place where I find myself writing better than I can.

This book has one blooper that I know of–there’s no way the characters can be drinking marionberry cordial, since marionberries weren’t introduced until the 1950s. Thanks to alert readers, that will be corrected in future reprints.

Happy 10-year anniversary to me and Mira Books!

There’s love…and then there’s love.

I didn’t know them, but their story has a kind of happy ending: 

 

Kathleen Florence Kane Rogers, age 94, and Bruce Harris Rogers, age 93, died peacefully in their home on Friday June 15. They were residents of Bainbridge Island since 2003.

Kathleen was born July 12, 1912, in Vancouver, B.C., the only child of Northern Irish parents Emily Kane and Daniel Long Hanna. She grew up in Victoria B.C. and moved to Tacoma, Washington as a teenager. She attended the University of Washington and then Cornish School as an art history major.

Bruce was born October 16, 1913 in Toronto, Kansas to Clarence and Minnie Rogers, both school teachers. The family moved to Seattle in 1927. He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1930 and the University of Washington Law School in 1937.

They were married in 1937 in Seattle, moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and then to Portland Oregon. They returned to Seattle where they lived with their family for 40 years on the shores of Haller Lake. After retirement they moved to Edmonds where Kathleen became an active member of the Friends of the Edmonds Library and the Historical Society where she served as a docent for many years.

They leave two sons, Michael of Bainbridge and John of Silverdale, 6 grandchildren, and 7 great grandchildren. Kathleen and Bruce recently celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary surrounded by family and friends.

At their request there will be no services; a family memorial gathering will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made to the Bainbridge Library or Helpline House.