"Lamott, Anne - Blue Shoe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lamott Anne)

congregation of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Marin City,
California, the Reverend Ms. Veronica Goines, pastor.

And I want to say a special thanks to Pat Gomez, of Tiburon,
California, who in 1982 took me in for a year and a half, when I was
drunk and sad and lonelier than I had ever been before, and with whom I
discovered a little blue shoe.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

Douglas Foster and Steven Barclay.

 I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom
at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who
remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I
hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.

juan ramon jimenez

 one.

The world outside the window was in flames. The leaves on the
pistachio trees shone fire-red and orange. Mattie studied the
early-morning light. She was lying on the side of the bed where her
husband should have been sleeping. Those trees were one reason she'd
moved back into her parents' old home after leaving Nicholas, these
trees and the sloping grassy hillside behind the house. Also, there
was no mortgage: her parents had paid it off during the course of their
marriage. She and her brother, Al, had grown up playing on the hill
and in the buckeyes with their low, broad branches; her six year-old,
Harry, played there now, and her daughter, Ella, two, would also climb
one day soon. The leaves of the delicate Japanese maple between
Mattie's window and the wobbly fence were still green, but elsewhere in
the garden were russets and butterscotch oranges, other trees giddy
with color, almost garish, like gypsy

dresses. When she strained to listen, she could imagine them saying,
We gave you shade, and now we'll give you a little kick-ass beauty
before we die. A choir of chickadees and finches sang above the sounds
of a quiet neighborhood waking up, the cars of people heading to work
and school, the clatter and thumps of the recycling truck, a dog
barking, leaves rustling in a gentle wind, silence. A moment later she
heard the rats in the walls begin to stir.

Her mother, Isa (it rhymed with "Lisa"), who still owned the house, had
failed to mention that there were rats in the walls. Rats, and the
green rug in the master bedroom that for many years had been peed on by
Isa's cats. A faint odor of urine clung to it despite Mattie's every
effort at eradication. Isa had been planning to sell the house as a
fixer-upper in the wildly inflated San Francisco Bay area real estate