When We Read by Michael Valliant You pick up a magazine on the Eastern Shore and flip through it, hoping to learn something. Maybe you want to figure out where to eat, or you love the area and are curious about living here. Maybe you grab the new Tidewater Times every month as soon as it comes out and you think of the writers as friends. Any which way, when you sit down to read, you want to take something with you, something you can use, something you remember. This is what we do when we read. If you’re like me, your expectations change depending on what you pick up. When I sit down on the back deck with Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, I want to be transported in both time and place in order to share the universal experience of a small-town summer with an everytown cast of characters. And I become this:
Tidewater Times
June 2022
And when you’re all to yourself that way, you’re really proud of yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.”
"Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people in the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. 51
