It’s time to drag the patio furniture out of storage, give it a good dusting, and set it out on the deck.
Then some weekend soon – after the house is cleaned and the compost taken out and the grocery shopping is done – it’ll be time to sink gratefully into a chair, stick bare legs out into a warm sunbeam, and read a good book.
There are few pleasures more easily accessible than sitting outside on a warm day, just reading.
I used to do this all the time when I was a kid. I picked up the tag “avid reader” early. No surprise, considering my mom was a career librarian. By the time I was 10, I knew how to use the library card catalogue, back in the pre-digital days.
I would happily stand at the catalogue, flipping through the V drawer (for vampires) or A (Arthur, King) or M (Mars), then turn over a fistful of request slips to the librarians behind the checkout counter.
I still get more than half of my books through the library, although the internet has made my browsing-by-subject habit a bit easier (S for seaweed, K for kelp, most recently; I’m on a marine biology kick).
If I wasn’t raiding the card catalogue, I was collecting books by the armload from the shelves – Asterix or Tintin collections, or just about anything with one of those spaceship stickers on the spine, when I was still in the children’s section.
Then I’d finished reading all the science fiction and fantasy there, so I raided the YA shelves. And then the adult science fiction section. My reading’s broadened a bit since then, but if you tell me a novel has great characters and well-written prose, and it also happens to take place on a space station, I’ll have it checked out pretty fast.
And then, in the summer, I could take a towel or an old blanket, fling it under a tree, and flop down for an hour’s reading.
There are plenty of other cozy ways to sink into a book. Sitting in a coffee shop or restaurant over lunch with a sci-fi magazine. Hunched over on public transit with a well-thumbed used paperback. A good winter’s reading, with sleet pattering against the windows, while you sit under blankets and with hot tea at hand, is deeply satisfying.
But outside in the late spring, through the summer, is my favourite. Flipping the pages while the crows carry on their raucous conversations. Watching a bee buzz past you, making her winding way from clover flower to clover flower across the lawn. Putting a small pebble on the corner of the page to keep it from flipping over in the light breeze.
I spend a good chunk of my life, working and non-working, plugged into the virtual world that strives to extend its tendrils into our every waking moment. I’m trying to spend less time doing that (I think a lot of us would like to). Sometimes that means going for a walk over lunch, going for a bike ride, or even just going to the grocery store with the radio turned off, no music nor podcast blaring.
Reading a book outdoors is another way to escape. It’s simultaneously an escape from our daily lives, into a book, and into the green and blue living world around us.
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