Loose Leaf Notes

1. Small town with big plans.

2. Some months my calendar looks like that.

3. They say home is where you leave your hat.  I left mine at the garden party I went to on Saturday. Photo by my friend Holly Marrow.

4. On Sunday I went to a campaign event for Joy Powers who is running to unseat Morgan Griffith. When I arrived, she hadn’t gotten there yet. A friend said, “We’re waiting for joy and that’s no metaphor,” and everyone laughed.

4. Never a Dull Moment: Life in Floyd and a 1972 album by Rod Stewart that I played a lot back in the day.

5. For People Who Like to Look at the Pictures and Not Read the Book HERE.

6. Yes, the book was better, but it’s a two week commitment, whereas watching the movie is only two hours.

7. Where else but in Floyd can you do an interview with a new downtown business owner while you’re both rocking on rocking horses?

8. Best read this week, excerpts:  “Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history… And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate…

9.  …Now entertainment is limitless. There’s no hard stop—one show bleeds into the next. People watch TV with their phone in hand, monitoring social media or texting with friends. Netflix has reportedly told directors and screenwriters to assume that the audience isn’t paying attention and to constantly remind viewers what’s going on. In this environment, people have to be really determined to read. Most aren’t. When people do read, they might find that they’re absorbing less information. That’s especially true if they read on their phone. The endless scroll, hyperlinks, and notifications invite surface-level reading, with constant invitations to look elsewhere. Studies have shown that people comprehend less when reading on a digital device than on paper, perhaps because of all these distractions.” More from The End of Reading is Here by Rose Horowitch in the Atlantic HERE.

10. Funny how these late night party dancers look like a mob of zombies.

11. “PSHAW” was the official Wordle (nytimes.com) answer on July 15, 2026. It was the first time in doing the Wordle puzzle daily for several years that I gave up.

12. I’m compelled to make up words out of license plate letters. My husband’s starts with TRD and I told him I can’t help but see the word “turd” when I look at it. What can we change it to? I asked him. He didn’t skip a beat and answered “true dat!”

13. I close my eyes to see / until the drum is silenced / until life’s puzzle is nearly finished / and I can add my piece to the whole / But don’t look too close / or you’ll miss the full picture / where everyone is a beautiful loner / where we all belong to each other / are the parts of the same single truth… Read my poem Surprise Ending in its entirety HERE.

________Thirteen Thursday