A few days ago, at an amusement park, I managed to snatch a few lines of Wendell Berry’s poetry. My husband and five of our children were happily endeavoring to crash into each other on bumper cars. For a few brief minutes, the baby slept in the stroller and I read a few stanzas.
I couldn’t tell you now which stanzas they were. Alas, such are the perils of reading with an infant (and teenagers and preteens and elementary-aged children). Most nights I’m too tired to read without falling asleep. My bedside stack continues to grow while the number of actual words read diminish.
Cultivating a reading is possible even in the amusement parks and amid raising children. In fact, it may be of the utmost importance to continue to carve out time to enter, however briefly, the world of words. I am by no means an expert at managing my time well and am as prone as others to succumb the deadening phone scroll, and I am not even on social media, but one thing that I do is bring a book with me wherever I go. Lately, I’ve had Buechner’s slim Telling the Truth (which we’re reading as part of BGF, an online book club) in the diaper bag, Berry’s The Peace of the Wild Things in my small handbag, and Alice’s My Pantry in the blue FjallRaven. That way whichever bag I need or if I have a few minutes wherever I may be, I have a book. All I can say with any sense of accuracy is that maintaining my connection with the written word matters to me. While I have started and let go of many (many) activities over the years, reading even in haphazard snippets continues. May it ever do so.