"All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death."

- Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

Dear Readers,

I cannot think of a more evocative time of year. The mornings begin with invigorating nippiness while the disappearing daylight lends urgency to the day's goings-on. 

Skeletons, coffins, & ghouls will begin to populate lawns around town, reminding us of what we culturally tend to avoid - the memory and pain of loss. I confess that I personally tend to get wrapped up in making choices about my future that give me a misguided sense that I can point my ship toward safety* and count on arriving at the destination. For goodness sakes, I read romance all summer so that I would know with 100% certainly that each story would end happily. 

Bolstered by some optimistic thinking (plus a reminder from theologian Kate Bowler** that hope is not certainty, hope is love), I've taken on some weightier and less predicable reading this fall. I'm pulling the bubble wrap off of my heart!

Earlier this month, I finished Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land which is a masterpiece punctuated with terrible loss in the name of exploring why and how we are able to keep putting one foot in front of the other (TLDR libraries & books!). I've now begun reading Honorée Jeffers' The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois about a young woman exploring the deep ancestry of her Southern family as she fights to belong to them and step into the matriarchy. And I've queued up Kate Bowler's new book No Cure for Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear) and Luis Alberto Urrea's 2018 novel The House of Broken Angels to follow it. 

I'm writing this from my "cloffice" at the back of the bookstore where I just heard a woman "of a certain age" - who was already being happily attended to by our booksellers - give a big belly laugh and impulsively ring our call bell for the sheer delight of hearing the "ding!" Which of course made everyone else laugh, too. And perhaps that's the secret of life and hope and love.

When asked what gives her hope, Kate Bowler (the incurable optimist with incurable cancer) replied, "that we belong to each other in a way that makes hope not really just about whether I get a cure and my life works out. It’s about whether you feel yourself as part of this wild project about love."

With a smile and a box of tissues,

Adah

*Thank you, Indigo Girls, for that metaphor.
**I highly recommend listening to Kate Bowler on Krista Tippett's podcast On Being.