I have just finished reading ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ by Robert James Waller. It’s broken my heart just a little bit. It’s left me feeling I want to take the day slow, like Robert Kincaid. He is the photographer in the book who says he’s the last cowboy, the end of the line and obsolete. The book makes me want to live slow and intensely, savouring the person I’m with and the touch of sun or breeze.
It makes me want to be a poet and an artist and a person who gives everything I have to the person I love. I don’t want to run around. I want to lie still.
There are few, very few books I have read over the last year that I would read again. This is a book I will come back to every year, maybe on a special day. It was published in 1992 and I can’t believe why I haven’t read it before. Though so simple at times, the words are laced with imagery and ideas that melt you into the heat of the summer.
This is not a plot driven book. It is about character, ideas and place. It doesn’t dip and dive and swerve around corners or up and down. It is graceful and pulls you along a shining thread that you attach yourself to willingly.
It’s not a long book, either. It’s perfect. Feels like you are reading a biography one moment and a myth the next. It’s strong, solid and stranded with gossamer.
My heart is touched with a September sunrise this morning, pink, pale blue and white yellow. I want to walk quietly along a long straight road with my eyes on the horizon.
Ruth Estevez 