'What beautiful flowers on your table.'
'Freesias. We got three bunches. Because they were cheap. They were just three bucks.'
'Where was this?'
'Farmers' Market'
Mabel and I spent a full two hours Sunday afternoon reading one book, a pentagram-shaped hard-page book called The Clock Without a Face. This is a book Mabel and I appropriated from her parents' bookshelves about a year ago, when she was still three. Since that first reading we have gone back and meticulously reread it five or six times. Mabel adores the structure of the book, which concerns an apartment building with a single unit on each floor and 13 inhabited floors. The apartment are revealed on thirteen successive levels as if without ceilings. We trace how the walls divide differently on different floors, and we take a particular interest in the placement of doors. There is a mystery aspect, searching for hidden objects inside the minutely detailed roomscapes, and meeting eccentric tenants along the way, but we can't completely explain why this book continues to hold our mutual interest. Mabel had many new theories in reading it today.
