1.
In a dream we were driving through a green valley, the road gravel, weathered houses on a small crescent to one side, and just beyond us to the right, a farm, house hidden in flowering trees, unpainted barns, soft grass waving in the breeze. A horse grazed near a collapsing fence. Everything was possible. Will we stop, I asked. But there was no way to leave the road. Not yet.
2.
I was walking alone on the Skookumchuck trail, all my possessions in a shopping cart, when 3 men passed me carrying cellos. Just ahead, they stopped and began to play Bach. Trees in the wind, a few stumps growing huckleberry from their crowns, ravens quiet in the canopy. There was no way to proceed on the trail, not yet, and no need to be anywhere else.
3.
Rereading Alice Munro at bedtime last night, I found a passage I have thought about so often over the years, have been haunted by, in the way that a few lines can sum up entire chapters of a life.
And then what? Nothing. But once in a while came a moment when everything seemed to have something to say to you. The rocking bushes, the bleaching light. All in a flash, in a rush, when you couldn’t concentrate. Just when you wanted summing up, you got a speedy, goofy view, as from a fun-ride. So you picked up the wrong idea, surely the wrong idea. That somebody dead might be alive and in Jakarta.
...Theresa Kishkan 
I like a view of the afterlife that includes an Alice Munro story. That’s one I’ve only read twice, but the passage feels as though it embodies a few of her stories.
I read the story many years ago and it’s not in any of the collections we have on our shelves. But our library flooded in the cold snap (pipes burst) so I’m trying to deal with a voracious reading habit in other ways. I got Munro’s Family Furnishings (a selected) at the Salvation Army Thrift Store last week, along with Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing — felt very lucky! And this Selected has a few stories I hadn’t read, along with “Jakarta”, which I’d read many years ago and hadn’t been able to forget that particular passage.
OH! That’s unfortunate. And not the kind of damage from which books can recover. Sometimes a change to sourcing our books can lead to unexpected discoveries though, like the “missing” passage you located here at last, and maybe you’re about to become the world’s biggest Eimear McBride fan (and then be sorry that her other books weren’t donated too). I didn’t have a picture of your reading habits but I can certainly relate to voracious and I rely heavily on the public libraries for sure.
The library anticipates a 4 week closure. Maybe 2 weeks ago? I read 3 or 4 books a week from a bunch of sources: library, special orders (for research, when I need something for a long period), general bookstore browses, gifts, review copies, friends’ shelves, thrift stores. And to be honest, we have thousands of books here, overflowing every shelf and room, and some of them are unread!
Ahh, so I can see where you’d be missing the library for browsing-options and injecting some new flavour but how the thrift shop would be filling that gap for just a few weeks anyway. Even if it takes a little longer than expected to make the repairs, you can get by and enjoy the other avenues of acquisition.
Friends pass along the NYRB and we get the New Yorker and Harpers as well as a few literary journals so there’s always something good to read!