Finding Normal

My new morning commute is forty-five minutes.

One way.

Does that sound a little crazy to anyone? That means every week I am driving about 7.5 hours back and forth to work . . . not including the time spent on the road if I happen to need a trip to town on a weekend.

I’m scaring myself just by adding up the numbers.

But do you want to know a secret?

I love it.

When I was first offered the job, one of my friends asked me if I was going to move into town to be closer to my new building.

I said no.

She understood.

First of all, I live in the middle of absolutely nowhere and have a tiny writer’s cabin tucked away in the middle of a pine forest surrounded by farmland and country roads. When I wake up in the morning, I hear magpies and bluejays and woodpeckers outside my house . . . not traffic and people and all the other city noises you can think of. I have deer and turkeys in my yard. I can go for walks at midnight down our dirt road if I feel like it. (I don’t usually feel like it.)

But besides loving where I am, I just . . . don’t hate my commute. In fact, as an author running a blog, writing books, and working full-time, my commute is some of the only time I have to really remember how much I love books myself.

Thank goodness for libraries that let me borrow 24 audiobooks at a time.

Really, my commute has been the saving grace for my reading habits. Thus far this year, I have read 66 books. Most of those have been audiobooks. With 7.5 hours of driving to do every week, I figure I can plow through at least a book a week. Maybe more, since I have lunch breaks too.

Finding out my library loaned out copies of audiobooks was a revolution for me. I have been devouring them while I paint for my mum, while I drive, while I work sudoku puzzles on my phone to keep my brain sharp . . . really just any time I have a few minutes of silence. I’ve been rediscovering some old favorites—right now I am listening to A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle—as well as discovering new treasures—Michael Hyatt’s Living Forward and as many of Agatha Christie’s books as I can find. As an author who still believes the best way to learn to write is to read, I am very grateful to have an unlimited library on my phone.

And plenty of time on my way to and from work to take advantage of it.

What are you reading these days? Any suggestions for me? I’d love to hear them!