A Good Book Club

Trust me, it's great!

Many years ago when my parents and I first moved to Virginia, the Winchester Welcome Wagon Club came to our front door and invited my mom to join their organization.  I really didn't expect my mom to join up because she hadn't been a part of any clubs while I was a child but she happily joined in.  It turns out that my mom had been very active in a lot of organizations before I came into this world and once I was in college she started to branch out again and have more of a social life.  Yay mom!!

The Winchester Welcome Wagon Club led to my mom meeting some really wonderful neighbors and locals who became good friends.  She also joined a local Christian Women's Club thanks to a lovely neighbor asking her to join that group as well.  All of this because some really nice, normal ladies took the time to canvas the neighborhood for newbies and invite them out.  We need more of this in our lives, I swear!

The lunches and breakfast meetings and outings and discussions my mom took part in were really awesome and she loved every minute of it.  Winchester became more of a home because of her friends and her active life outside of her four walls.  The best activity, in my opinion, were the book club meetings she went to almost every month.  I liked how the members would rotate homes each month and get to pick which book everyone would read if they were to be the hostess.  Their husbands and kids couldn't be home - it was for members only.  It was a neat monthly event that my mom always looked forward to and I secretly wanted to join.  Actually, it wasn't secret.  I whined to my mom every time that I wanted to come and it was pathetic of me.  LOL

My employer has been sponsoring a book club for some time but today was my first foray into it.  We read The Dog Stars and I had no desire to read it after I saw a synopsis.  Another dystopian novel about what it's like to live after a pandemic wipes out most of the population?  No thanks.  Depressing!  My desperation to finally join a book club led me to read the first few pages of the book and I was hooked.  It wasn't depressing at all and was an amazing, amazing book.  Read it if you can!

Anyway, the pleasure of reading the book was enhanced when I got to sit and eat cake and listen to six women and one (former Navy) man talk about the book and a bunch of things that had absolutely nothing to do with the novel like the Mycenaean culture's extinction, chicken pox, tornadoes, rabbits, and bomb shelters.  I listened to a lovely lady from Alabama talk about how she didn't believe her husband's warnings that a tornado was coming until she saw her bedroom curtains being sucked out of her window.  You get the idea...  It was awesome.  :-)