Author Day Revisited, by Mrs Thinman

19 Aug, 2025

My husband is a very silly man. At times, he will speak reams and reams worth when three words would do. At other times, he leaves out so much context the listener is left baffled.

I’m expecting “Author Day” would be the latter.

In our household, we always celebrate accomplishments, sometimes even very small ones. I wanted to do something truly unique for this one, though, and luckily, at the last minute, it came to me: we would visit and name some trees.

In his recent novel, The Night Plummer and The Mockemortician, one of Mr. Thinman’s main characters, Agnas, likes to bring books to a little grove and read. In The Ladies of the Wood section, he describes how she’s assigned personalities to each of the nearby trees who keep her company. Also, she’s reading a local forestry book in which an acolyte frequently describes individual trees by comparing them to specific, unflattering descriptions of the Minza overseeing them.

So I thought we might imitate Agnas and the nameless acolyte, and take to the trees. We could name them, describe them, and perhaps read under them.

Enter the Landis Arboretum.

I prepared the only way I know how: meticulously. Tiny notebooks for field notes (that we didn’t actually use). Snacks. Water. Insect repellent. A hat (that I forgot). Copies of the novel. Image Description Two little green notebooks. The darker green, to the left and overlapping, says Lillian's Extremely Serious Book About Trees with a sketch of a pine tree. The one to the right and underneath has a lighter green cover and says Lillian's Seriously Whimsical Book About Trees By Lillian and has a sketch of a deciduous tree.

We did see a Gran Turino with the driver on the wrong side of the car (making the whole thing on the wrong side of the ocean, I said). And I will forever wonder why that Man of a Certain Age plunked his lawn chair in that deep ditch and sat himself down there, staring into the culvert under his driveway. I do not wonder why his wife was looking at him Like That.

But the real event was the land and the trees. At first I was worried, because we couldn’t see the trees for the forest. Eventually, though, the occasional tree began to pop out, and we named our three. And that’s not nothing, for total novices. Maybe we’ll expand on it another time.

Later we settled on a bench under the shade of the “New Great Oak.” Mr. Thinman asked me to read him The Ladies of the Wood as if he were asking me to gnaw off my own thumb and give it to him. Of course I read it to him. I told him I’d read his whole book to him, if he liked it that much. We’ve been known to read each other books before – why not read him his own? (He is self-conscious because he wrote this one. He’ll settle down after a couple of chapters.)

After the reading, on the walk back out of the woods, it began to rain, and we left rather faster than we expected. But still, he was happy. We celebrated. It was memorable, it was special. And that’s exactly what he needed.

Image Description A short-haired woman with tortoise-shell cat eye glasses in a green dress with a blue floral paisley design (me) with Mr Thinman leaning over my right shoulder and smiling, and my oldest son in a wild banana shirt smiling behind my left shoulder.