The Writer’s Almanac tells me today is the birthday of writer Vita Sackville-West, born one hundred and twenty years ago at Knoll House in Kent, England. I began reading several of her works, which I enjoy tremendously, after I visited her home and gardens, Sissinghurst, also in Kent. It was a home in which I felt very comfortable, in which I could easily picture myself living – just take away all these tatty tourists and I’ll move right in.
As to her birthplace, Knoll, I remember four things about it: the 365 rooms (not that I visited them all), the ingenious Knoll sofa, endless staircases, and the bone-chilling cold in the sunny month of May. The tatty tourists can have that one. Maybe if they all rustle around and do a dance they can warm up the place.
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The Almanac also tells me she wrote: "It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" It must have been lovely to be able to have the leisure to see that those days didn’t slip emptily by. I’m sure she had other things to do, places to go, people to see, but I’m also sure she had household help. I don’t. I do have a nice chunk of leisure now that I’m retired, but the household chores are still mine to do. The laundry is tumbling away even as I write this. Every once in a while my schedule goes haywire and I’ve got to write a list of things to do, but usually I manage a properly apportioned rota of day-to-day chores that affords me lots of time to write – and read. Right now life is mah-velous!
Oh – yes! Happy Birthday Vita.
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