While we’ve been staying in California, my mom and I spend every afternoon walking around my aunt and uncle’s retirement development. It’s a sprawling development, set up against some steep and rocky hills that are so dry and barren there aren’t any trees on them. It’s a stark contrast to where the properties begin, since the whole development is nicely watered, sprawling golf course included. From the topmost part of the course, you can see the low, wide valley covered in lights and houses, and the bare hills, and far off in the distance some incredibly high, snowy mountains. It’s been cold and rainy during our stay, so the mountains are often cut off by clouds, but that late in the day, light that misses us often cuts through and hits those mountains and hills and slices them up with orange.
My mom describes herself as ‘more analytical’, so it makes sense that when I see her read, she’s always poring through scientific papers for her work. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her read a book for pleasure. But during one of these walks, when we were up high and enjoying the view of the mountains and valley, she told me about a book she read in high school, ‘Tess’ by Thomas Hardy, and how she liked it so much she read it twice. She said that she went up the mountain right by their village to see if she could imagine what it was like in the book, but that the scene she saw in Korea wasn’t anywhere near as beautiful as she imagined it in her head. Then when she watched the movie version of ‘Tess’ (it took me awhile to figure out that she was talking about ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’), she wanted to stop watching because it messed with the version she’d imagined in her head. She said that the scene we saw in Hemet, of an impossibly wide valley, far away mountains, huge sky above, was more like what she imagined.
And what was nicest about all this was that I’ve read and loved books my whole life, and spend a lot of time dreaming around, imagining scenes in books. I’d never thought of my mom as the sort of person to read a book twice, to climb a mountain to imagine what it might be like in the book, and then there she was.
I love this story about your mom. I am also surprised that she loved a book that much. But then on second thought, I am not. My father was just like this — but one day, he read Les Miserables, and couldn’t put it down. I think he ended up reading it a couple more times.