Finished!

I actually finished it Friday -- a few minutes before the twins got off the bus.  I was rushing to devour all words before hope of any silence vanished for the three day weekend.

It was amazing.  Well worth the 800+pages.  Well worth the time investment last week.
Well done, Mr. King.

I find myself thinking about the characters -- Jake and Sadie especially -- and the concept of "strings" of alternate futures/pasts colliding if we attempt to mess with the past.  And it makes me feel better somehow.  No regrets.  No mistakes.  Everything happens for a reason.  Or, as King put it, "Life turns on a dime."

And I learned a new word in this book:  obdurate.  As in, "The past is obdurate."  As in "unmoved by persuasion, pity, or tender feelings; stubborn; unyielding."

The past harmonizes.  I like that.  Now I notice these things - like the similarity between our very loved house in Alaska where we began our married life and our home now in Texas - where we begin again.

I like this poem by Philip Larkin.  The Trees.  I heard it mentioned on NPR in an interview with a classical pianist, Simone Dinerstein (link to the interview here).  She named her most recent album, "Something Almost Being Said", after this poem.

The Trees by Philip Larkin 

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief. 

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain. 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.