The Trends section of Poets and Writers had a delightful article about the Matilija Lending Library in El Monte, California. Amy J. Wong and Andrew Fung Yip, started the lending library that they named after a native California poppy that thrives in fire-ravaged landscapes. The couple cleaned up a former shoe-repair shop and with elbow grease and donations turned it into a lending library, sanctuary and gathering place for their diverse neighbors in the San Gabriel Valley.

The ARTS page of last Sunday’s Democrat and Chronicle had an eye-catching image of two women in wheel chairs who were part of Kinetic Light’s Fall 2022 East Coast tour in Geneva and at the University of Rochester. The show, “Under Momentum” featured two artists in wheelchairs performing on ramps. Alice Sheppard, artistic director, and Laurel Lawson celebrate motion, speed and gravity.

It’s easy to say there are many things I don’t enjoy reading about, and there’s also quite a few things that catch my eye. Mostly Canallers: Collected Stories (1934) by Walter D. Edmonds has taught me more than I expected to learn about life in the early days along the Erie Canal. The hardships, cruelty, competition and ugliness contrast with kindness and neighborliness in the varied stories. On the lighter side is his use of old-timey language. I went to the dictionary and found squish, squishy, squoosh, squooshy, but no squudge – a marvelous word for the sound of hooves on a muddy path. His characters regularly called someone a bezabor – also not in the dictionary, but showed up online in texts describing a “character.”

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