Reading in the Garden

Little Free Library in Tree Stump in Coeur d’Alene, ID   Yesterday, my sister sent me a link to an article about a woman in Coeur d'Alene who turned a 100-year-old tree stump into a Little Free Library and I just had to see it for myself. The article stated that the tree was dying, rotting on the inside, so they had to have it removed. When some people have trees cut down they leave a large section to turn into wood sculptures. I love to see the works of art that are created from those stumps.  But this stump takes the cake. Instead of a sculpture, owner and artist, Sharalee Armitage Howard, turned her tree stump into the most magnificent Little Free Library I’ve ever seen!   The library was not yet listed on the map, so the search was on. Carefully viewing the video, I tried to narrow down where the house was located. Then I enlisted my husband’s help to search with me and we found it on the first street we turned down. It’s hard to miss.  This fabulous library is bi

Wonderfully Wilde Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1854.   He was a multi-talented and wildly popular witty writer and lecturer. He wrote everything from fairy tales to poems and plays, as well as one novel, T he Picture of Dorian Gray .   Oscar Wilde was a husband and father of two boys, and he was gay, a well-known secret.   When he was professionally at the top of his game, he had an affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.   Unfortunately, Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, found out and was not too pleased. Alfred’s angry dad left Oscar a nasty little calling card on which he called him a sodomite, though in his outrage he misspelled it as somdomite.   Oscar took offense to the slur and sued the marquis for libel—a life-changing error on his part.   He should have let it go, let it go, or at least known the importance of having a good attorney. During the trial Daddy Douglas’s sneaky lawyer turned attention to Wilde’s alte

John, the Muse You may know that Robert Louis Stevenson is the famed author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and other tales.    But did you know that this sickly Scottish author stayed in a boarding house in San Francisco at the end of 1879 until the spring of 1880, waiting for his true love, Fanny, to finalize the end of her marriage to a philandering husband? During that time, Stevenson wrote furiously trying to earn money for life with his soon-to-be bride and her kids, who were across the bay in Oakland.   He cranked out essays, penned about his own travels across America, wrote the novella Prince Otto , and contemplated writing The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World. While no draft of the book actually exists, Brian Doyle took up the challenge to write what could have been another of Stevenson’s masterpieces.   In the old, floriferous, wordy, and opu