Evidently January is gone. And half of February too. The crocuses and a few brave daffodils have sprouted and the rain feels rather more renewing than the dark December torrents of days past.

I discovered Virginia Woolf last night. She'd been hiding in my library. I'd never read anything by her - not a word, a sentence, a paragraph. In college I studied history, a rebellion of sorts from my parents - former literarature majors with rooms of dusty books who'd graduated to become impoverished writers with drawers of unfinished manuscripts. I am cursed with being a practical sort of person. In the same way that flower gardens have never seemed quite as useful as vegetable or herb gardens, literature didn't seem at all purposeful to me back then, with all its metaphor and imagery and allusion. Why dilly-dally with make-believe when there were so many actual things of importance to examine?

Now, history was practical. What could be more relevant than what happened yesterday? The more recent the better of course, so it had to be American twentieth century: the suffragettes, the Great Depression, the world wars, the Atomic bomb, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contra.... It still gives me a zip - all the things humans have done, all the layers of civilizations built one atop the other. We humans are so busy, like carpenter ants, building and tearing down, fidgeting with one thing or another - be it roads or bombs or symphonies. Strangely now it is the ancient history that excites me more though.

But literature - I think it's been my true love all along. It turns out history may have always just been my mistress.