Two Gifts: Airborne and Edible

1. For the community: I wrote my presentation for the AAUW event this coming Tuesday:

When I got married in 1955, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s eloquent and elegant book, Gift From the Sea, had been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 19 weeks. It went on to remain there for 80 weeks all together.

I read it not long after coming home from my honeymoon on Catalina Island, off the California coast. I had grown up loving the ocean, so I was entranced by the idea of a few weeks in a beach cottage.

In those days, Charles Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic nonstop from New York to Paris in The Spirit of St. Louis, was still famous, but Anne, a pioneering aviator herself, nearly equaled his fame with this book. In it she addresses issues that are timeless: essentially how does a woman fulfill the roles of citizen, artist, wife, partner, mother, career person, friend, family member, and balance all of that with the time and self-commitment for spiritual and emotional nurturing.

I’ve returned to this book half a dozen times over the decades, and its words always speak to me in a new way and shed light on how I structure my time. To pay homage to Mrs. Lindbergh, five years ago I volunteered to be a grant reviewer for the Lindbergh Foundation. As a reviewer I was able to ask Mrs. Lindbergh’s youngest child, her daughter Reeve, a writer herself, if she’d be interested in signing bookplates for the AAUW award recipients. She agreed to do so.

She wrote: “It is good to know that my mother’s writing has meant so much to you over the years. I feel very much the same way about it and return, as you do, to this little volume for comfort and for inspiration. All my best to the scholars. Warmly, Reeve Lindbergh”

I hope you’ll treasure this little book as much as I have.

2. For my freelance anthology work:
I wrote a last minute story to contribute to the Redbook competition on couples, about how much I miss Ken's delectable, delicious cooking for me. Ken was a first class chef.

It's been a good writing day.