To Kill a Mockingbird

Good lighting… and story telling. Or more specifically, the Summer Photography Challenge for Day 2 is: “…to go out and practice using light and telling a story with your mobile phone camera.”

I’ve been re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird this summer, and I’ve recently started working on mug cozies again to get my Etsy shop re-stocked for the fall. So I guess the “story” this picture tells is what I’ve been doing in my leisure time lately.

Harper Lee’s long-awaited second book, Go Set a Watchman, goes on sale today. I am looking forward to reading it, but I don’t plan to rush out and buy it. I’ll read it from the library first. It will likely be awhile before my name gets to the top of the waiting list, but that’s okay.

A few weeks ago Lyle and I were in Barnes and Noble one evening and I happened to notice a book discussion group gathered between the bookshelves. As I browsed nearby I overhead them discussing To Kill a Mockingbird. I was tempted to pull up a chair and join the discussion. I expect I would have been welcome, but I wasn’t quite that brave.

The group discussed the book and the movie, as well as another book, The Mockingbird Next Door. I remembered seeing that book on the library website in ebook format, so when I got home I checked it out. It is the memoir of a reporter who became friends with Harper Lee and her sister and lived next door to them for a time a few years ago. It was a fun read, giving more insight into the lifestyle of the Lee sisters and the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, which was the inspiration of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird.

As it happens, my dad’s people were from the Monroeville area couple of generations back. I don’t know a lot about them, but I have the sense they would have been more like the Ewell family in the book, rather than the Finches. (Now that I type that out, it is kind of eerie that my family name is Ezell which is just one letter different than Ewell. Kinda makes you wonder!) Oh, well. It’s not where you come from, but rather where you’re going that matters, right?

{Linking to Word Power & Literacy Musings Mondays and Booknificent Thursdays.}