Off the Shelf
My boyfriend’s parents (Maria Estrella Iglesias and Christopher Maurer) wrote an elegant memoir about a southern family who started the Shearwater pottery colony off of the Mississippi Coast. It’s a very niche subject, but the book opens up a greater rumination on the very nature of art as a way of living. I finished reading the book in December, but one passage in particular by Estrella (I know it sounds as if I’m just sucking up here) sticks with me:
It was in Spain, in grade school, that I first heard of the Mississippi River. What I learned, I don’t know. What stuck in my mind forever was that it was the widest—or was it the longest?—river in the world. At the age of six or seven, during a family picnic, I almost drowned in a shallow, narrow brook that deepened unexpectedly into a pool. And the pool deepened in my imagination into the Mississippi, The Mississippi took on a wild, mysterious character. When I went to the movies, any American river became the Mississippi. It ran invisibly through Gone With the Wind. It was the South.
