Letter to a Girl in Holding

If I knew, I would tell you about the winter I vanished, and in the Desert (as is most often the case), learned that Love takes the greatest beating of all.

Enemies

He looked up from loading the tools back into his truck and saw in the bare yard, the old Maple, left for shade when the lot had been cleared. 

     In the heat, exhausted from the day, he saw the tree, not as beautiful, as he once would have, but as a big, dumb, thing. A thing on which his thoughts were wasted, his time. A thing that, like the farmers and deadbeats, who, on good days he called neighbors, offered him only blank stares when he spoke of his desires. A thing that, in its inability to give, had unknowingly stolen from him the brightness of his words. Everything in this place had become an enemy. 

              

Bridge to Terabithia

I figure my Elementary School had Katherine Paterson's, Bridge to Terabithia on a shit-list of some sort. That's why I never read it as a kid.

I went to a private school. A Christian private school. A school so uptight, it made St. Paul's, the local Catholic school, look like some sort of inner-city den of iniquity. A school that didn't hire ... even part time ... liberated, new-age hippy music teachers, like Bridge's Miss Edmunds. A school that prayed regularly, said the Pledge of Allegiance and would blackball in a heartbeat, even a Newberry Medal-Winner, with a character like short-haired, pants wearing Leslie Burke, who says, and I paraphrase, that she didn't believe God went around damning people straight to hell.

Why Leslie, don't be such a silly girl.

Sigh. What else did I miss out on?

Anyway, I've read Bridge to Terabithia now. Got a lovely signed '77 hardcover edition. Cried like a baby. Wonderful read. Highly recommend it.