Plane Reads I: _Emotionally Weird_ by Kate Atkinson

 My instructions on what to do in Dayton are clear: 'MOM! We need cheap American candy and chocolate chips. Those Costco ones, they just don't work for us.'

'Oooh...what about those chocolate covered potato chips! The Esther ones?' 

Of course, I go to Esther Price. Mike Sells potato chips and Esther Price chocolate: a marriage 

It's one of my rituals. I don't make it to Brim (probably a good thing; I don't need any hats at this moment), but I do make it to Dorothy Lane Market to briefly recalibrate.  Mama's best friend A and I plant Hostas around the angel and mums at the cemetery. It feels grounding to be with her. She's known me longer than almost anyone, even my uncles. She knows all of my mom's secrets and stories.  She loves me for myself and expects nothing in return except for my happiness, for me to believe in myself as much as I believe in everyone else.  We talk about whether buying a property in Dayton is sensible, about how I occasionally feel like I don't belong anywhere, in spite of knowing I belong wherever I am.

I started _Emotionally Weird_ on my last day in Larvik. Atkinson's writing always engages me. _Human Croquet_ still ranks as a favorite comfort reads. Is it weird that most of my comfort reads are women writers or crime fiction? I mean, there's just something about Himes, Chandler and Hammett. I may have to create a fictional law firm with the partners thusly named.  In between reading it, I've also been researching Norwegian 17th and 18th century architecture and reworking early chapters of _Murder at Narodni Trida_, plus my homework for Sacrosanct.  

The narrative of an Undergraduate student disillusioned with life and from a fractured background, well...does that hit close to the bone? Of course, I like Effie. Of course, I can see my 19/20 year old self in her and in Olivia. Of course, I want to adopt the damn dog, write meandering crime fiction. And damnit...I love Dundee, weirdly. It is one of the most lovely places...just itself and f@ck everyone else. And the water: being pulled under into the reeds, the undertow, the silt, and the mud, and the dark....yes. Too close to the bone. And then a fire, making everything clean with ash. 

I suppose it is a good thing we are boarding. And that my dad has always been my dad, my mama always my mama.