Hello readers, and welcome to the the Notable Happenings of the life of Millie Florence.
Keyboard
I brought a new keyboard. I am very excited about this for reasons that are likely quite obvious.
At the Gym
I was between sets (and rather out of breath) when a woman came up to me.
“Sorry—are you Millie Florence?”
“Yes, I am.”
She smiled. “My daughter is too shy to come up and talk to you on her own, but she got excited as soon as she saw you. She loves your… what was it? Honey Butter?”
A younger girl, half hidden behind her mom, smiled at me shyly.
I asked her what her favorite part of the book was, and she said she liked the whole thing.
Certainly, the gym is not the place I would expect to meet readers, but I’m far from complaining!
At the Post Office
I always enjoy going to the post office. There seems to me to be something enchanting about it. I have been informed that post offices in busier towns are less enchanting, but our post office is usually pretty quiet.
On the day of this visit I had to visit to check my PO box and buy stamps to send out the preorder rewards for A Letter, a Lighthouse, adna Ghost Cat.
I asked the man at the register for 40 sunflower stamps and one international stamp.
“How did you know?” He said cheerily. “I have exactly one international stamp left!”
“It’s serendipity.” I said.
“It’s been a while since I heard that word.”
“Serendipity?”
He laughed.
Serendipity
Noun.
“the ability to find valuable or agreeable things not sought for: also : luck that takes the form of such finding.”
Mistaken Ages
A few weeks ago I started volunteering leading the class of middle school girls at my church. The first week, I sat in the classroom as the girls trickled in after service. When they were all present and chatting amongst themselves, I said “Alright! Now that everyone’s here, let’s get started.”
One of the girls stared at me in surprise. “Oh.” She said. “I thought you were also a middle schooler.”
I think “astonished” would be the best word to describe her expression when I informed her that I was, in fact, 23.
I’m delighted to be able to add another installment to the comedy epic of “people think Millie is a lot younger than she really is”.
Readers in the Wild
Also at church, while I was waiting between the service I had attended and the service I would volunteer at I continued my re-reading of This Beautiful Truth by Sarah Clarkson.
An older lady I didn’t know came up to me and said hello. She said she was happy to see a younger person reading a physical book, because she loved to read, but in this day and age it was a bit of a “lost art”.
“I assure you,” I said “it’s not a lost art. I actually write books as well as read them.”
We had a lovely conversation.
I certainly hope reading is not a lost art.
Underlined Quotes From my Re-reading of This Beautiful Truth
(A note for my younger readers—This Beautiful Truth is an adult non-fiction book, so some of you might not be quite ready to read this yet!)
“What if God can speak in creation and song, story and vision the things words, in their frailty, cannot yet bear?”
“For beauty comes to us all in moments that unravel our cynical surety as our hearts seem to come apart at the touch of some odd slant of light on an evening walk.”
“The light was thick like honey, low in the sky so that the shadows grew long under the trees and tangled their gentle darkness with the gold.”
“Augustine called the created world a book written not with ink but the stuff of the cosmos,”
“Peace grew like moonlight within me,”
“the interesting thing about a story is the way it can contain the tension of impossible questions and embodied answers:”
Docendo disco, scribendo cogito.
(I learn by teaching, think by writing.)
— Millie Florence
You have captured a very comedic September in your whimsical way. I found myself laughing and sharing these with my family. Thank you, and please do one every month!
(P.S. was reading this while sipping pumpkin spice hot cocoa and eating pumpkin spice muffins.)