On the money

I zipped through Elizabeth Berg's "The Pull of the Moon" in a matter of hours. Now this is my favorite! She explains exactly what I feel yet so eloquently. The character, Nan, leaves home. Just packs a bag and gets in her car and heads west. Leaves her husband (she loves him dearly) and her home and heads on her adventure. Her first purchase is a journal. The book is what she writes in the journal and the letters she sends home to her husband. She's driving off the beaten track. I love that.....I hate interstates and my hubby thinks that's insane. I want to experience every curve in the road and what there is to see. "When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger." The fact that Nan has long hair at 50 and even though at that age it looked sort of silly, but she always had long hair, and didn't feel herself without it. Or someone asking your age and you say 64 so you'll look young for your age. That's me! Nan stops in a trailer park and meets a woman there and they chat and have lunch. Totally different personalities but they find a common thread. One stop is at a farmhouse where an 86 year old woman is shelling peas and Nan asks if she can just sit on the porch step and listen to the peas drop in the bowl. Their conversation leads to the woman disclosing the beautiful poems her husband had written to her over the years but never showed her. She found them after he passed away. Or the conversations she used to have on that porch with all her friends as they shelled peas or husked corn. She was the last of them to still live in her own home. The rest were gone or in nursing homes. The last stop was a lemonade stand with a young girl manning the stand. She sold her lemonade for 50 cents. She also sold her poems for 50 cents. She was fresh out of poems but said she would go write her one if she would watch the stand for her. The poem had a bridge over a river full of monsters with a land of purple fields and yellow clouds. She became Empress Nana Exsanna Popana. With that she turned and headed home ready to face what was yet to come.