kitchen table
set for breakfast, room smelled
of coffee, bacon
Admit it, you can smell the bacon.
You can smell the bacon and it made you smile.
Last week while visiting my sister Lisa, she made bacon and eggs from breakfast on cold dreary day and I can still smell that happy smell.
This is based on this excerpt from Charlotte’s Web.
When Mr. Arable returned to the house half an hour later, he carried a carton under his arm. Fern was upstairs changing her sneakers. The kitchen table was set for breakfast, and the room smelled of coffee, bacon, damp plaster, and wood smoke from the stove.
Yesterday’s quote from Charlotte’s Web got me to thinking about this great book.
Sure sure it’s all about teaching kids about life and death and everything.
But for me it was just a joy to read and have read to you.
I never saw the great, dark picture of life that others painted from the book. (This is a reoccurring theme in my life of missing the possible intended pathos for the romance.)
Much of what is written about Charlotte’s Web reminds me of when I was in college and one Professor assigned a book that was written by another Professor at Michigan that I had a good relationship with.
To answer the first Professor’s assigned questions about the book, I walked over to talk to the Professor who had authored it.
That Professor looked at me, tossed the paper with the questions on his desk and said, “That guy has been telling me things about my book I never knew since I got here.”
EB White himself read the book for a recording and you can listen to it hear from YouTube.
(If you want to download this as an MP3 and add to your phone to listen to later or while at pool, use https://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/.)
For me, the magic of hearing EB White reading his words in his New England accent with his own phrasing, pausing, infliction and emphasis is real and beyond words.
You can smell the bacon and wood smoke and can hear the geese and see the barn.
One last tidbit on the book, I read somewhere that when EB White submitted the manuscript to his publisher, it was ready to go to press without any EDITING.
On the one hand, what else would you expect?
On the other hand, it is still a fascinating comment on EB White.
