I always have piles of books lying around: books in progress, books lined up for one of the reading challenges I’m doing, books I’ve finished reading, but want to reread select parts of or write notes about. But the very best pile of all is the one of books next up to be read. I got this little pile at the library this week, except for the top one which I own and had already started to read. Here’s what I got:

What I Learned at Bug Camp, Sarah Juniper Rabkin. I’m always on the lookout for collections of essays, and I read about this one on Susan J. Tweit’s blog. Rabkin is a naturalist, artist and teacher, and I’m very much enjoying her thoughtful writing.

The Muse Is IN: An Owner’s Manual to Your Creativity, Jill Badonsky. This brightly-illustrated book looks like a fun jump start to creativity. It might help me with my proposed 30 Days of Creativity (coming soon!).

The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days, Ian Frazier. A humorous novel written in daybook form, the main character is a “hilariously desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red wine, who speaks to the frustrations of everyday life.” I read about this in the New York Times, and it sounds like a good antidote to stress, don’t you think?

Moving to Higher Ground, Wynton Marsalis with Geoffrey C. Ward. Marsalis writes about lessons learned in a lifetime in jazz—I’m quite excited about finally checking this out, because it’s one of the books that’s been on my TBR list the longest!

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn. The novel that made such a splash last year, apparently a twisty/turny thriller. I’m looking forward to seeing what the fuss was all about.

I’ll have to start Gone Girl first because there are people signed up after me to read it and I won’t be able to renew it after the checkout period is over. This might be a challenge, because next week will be given up to entertaining out-of-town family and celebrating my son’s graduation from high school. Surely I’ll be able to sneak a little reading time in there. I hope.

In addition to piles of books, I have lists of books. On Sunday I spent an hour puttering through my TBR list, consolidating and updating. I’d finished a book, and wandered through the library catalog looking for something new to put on hold (see pile above for the result). I checked reviews on Amazon to see if I still wanted to read a few books that had been on my list for a while, crossing out a few, but mostly transferring them to a clean page in my organizer. My library recently changed its cataloging system, and it took me a little while to figure out how to best use it.  Occasionally, a book on my list will disappear from the catalog and I have to decide if I want to try interlibrary loan, buy a copy, or discard the book from my TBR list. Momentous decisions!

Note: I had scheduled this poem before the tornadoes in Oklahoma. I'm going to run it as planned, because it seems even more timely now. My heart goes out to those in Moore, OK and anywhere else where people are coping with the aftereffects of disaster. 

Laura Dimmit is from Joplin, Missouri, and her family survived the fierce tornado of May, 2011. The entire area was strewn with debris, and here’s a poem about just one little piece that fell from the sky. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

School photo, found after the Joplin tornado 

                                             “Joey, 4th grade, 1992”

He’s been on the fridge since it happened,

sneaking glances from underneath the cat

magnet at our dinners, coffee habits, arguments.

We posted him on the database of items found,

hoping that someone would recognize his messy

hair, Batman t-shirt, blue eyes, but no one

answered the post or claimed him.

Somewhere a childhood photo album is not

quite complete, or a grandmother’s mantelpiece;

an uncle’s wallet. One afternoon I got restless,

flipped through my old yearbooks, trying to find him,

looking to see how he might have aged: did he lose

the chubby cheeks? dye his hair? how long

did he have to wear braces? But he’s too young

to have passed me in the halls, the picture just

a stranger, a small reminder of the whirling aftermath

when Joplin was clutching at scraps: everything displaced,

even this poor kid who doesn’t even know he’s lost.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2012 by Laura Dimmit, and reprinted by permission of the poet. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

Our subdivision just started a new program—“Yard of the Month.” There’s a sign posted right at the entrance with the address of the winning house. When I saw the sign, I realized immediately that we’ll never have “Yard of the Month.” Not because we have an ugly yard, or a neglected yard—what we have is a yard that doesn’t fit the image of what a subdivision’s “Yard of the Month” should look like. We’ve left a good portion of our front yard in its natural state, except for grass required by the subdivision in the portion of our yard between the sidewalk and the street. This is our choice and our preference. I’m completely fine with never winning “Yard of the Month.” There’s something very freeing about not buying into someone else’s ideal.

This got me thinking about other areas of life where I might be buying into other people’s expectations: what I do (and don’t do) with my horse, how clean (or dirty) my house is, and, most certainly, what I do (and don’t do) as a parent. This last is particularly on my mind as we get ready to send Nick out into the world. It didn’t take us long to realize our son is not a fits-the-mold kind of kid. (But he was “Student of the Month” one time—in first grade!) We’ve had to frequently reexamine our expectations and choices to see if we were doing what was best for him or just what everyone else was doing.

It’s a good practice to take inventory of all our activities from time to time, asking ourselves why we do what we do. Because we really want to, or because someone else thinks we should? It’s all too easy to buy into someone else’s idea of happiness/fun/worth, without stopping to consider what we actually think ourselves.

I’m still learning this lesson—as we probably all are. How about you? Is there anything you’ve stopped doing after evaluating why you were doing it? Anything you’ve started doing just because you want to?

It’s time once again for a roundup of websites and blog posts that I’ve collected in my internet meanderings that I think you might like.

Visit http://tinybuddha.com/ for “simple wisdom for complex lives.” Lots of good and inspiring stuff here.

Susan J. Tweit always writes thoughtful and interesting blog posts. This one,  posted on the second Valentine’s Day after the death of her husband, touched and inspired me.

Watch this video by Brendan Burchard on limiting beliefs—what if you focused on your greatness, instead of your weakness and insecurity?

I love Gretchen Rubin’s books about happiness (The Happiness Project and Happier at Home), and read her blog nearly every day (the comments following the posts are always interesting, too). This post resonated with me, because the things I really want to do, that I know will add true happiness to my life, are not always the ones I find easiest.

Read about 22 things happy people do differently here. 

If you want a low-key way to add more poetry (and inspiration) to your life, visit Samantha Reynolds’ site, bentlily. I love the subtitle: “the art of noticing your life.”