I relished my day to myself yesterday - listened to country music while I packed up things from the kitchen and wallowed in an old "dysfunctional family home for Thanksgiving" movie in the evening. Need to finish wrapping and packing glasses today since Steve will be back later this afternoon and they are drying all over the kitchen counters. He woke me up from a dead sleep this a.m. so we didn't talk much - just a Happy Mother's Day greeting and a go back to sleep from him. Wish I could have! Once the grogginess wore off I was wide awake.

Of course I read - I am in awe of Julius Lester's Day of Tears. Subtitle states "a novel in dialogue". For me it read like a first person novel in multiple voices - I wasn't really thinking about the fact that it was supposed to be dialogue - felt like storytelling. Beautiful, terse, poignant, bring tears to your eyes real life stories told by the people who lived them. All the raw emotion is there to be felt in the words. Lester tells the interwoven tale of the slaves and owners on two plantations in the South. The novel is based on the real record breaking auction of Pierce Butler's slaves to pay off his gambling debts. The lists of slaves and the prices they brought are from historical records. If this is to be Lester's last novel, he had done himself proud - 175 pages of pure emotion.

Off to the kitchen to pack.