. . .is NOT purple.  Nina Sankovitch’s is.  I know because we sat together in it for all 222 pages of her book, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair:  My Year of Magical Reading.

In the Prologue: On the Cliff, she writes, “I needed to sit down and sit still and read.  I had spent the last three years running and racing, filling my life and the lives of everyone in my family with activity and plans and movement, constant movement.  But no matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t get away from the grief and the pain.” p. 3 – 4.

Entranced, I shared an insight from Nina’s purple chair now and then with friends on Facebook.  Before I knew it, they were sitting in Nina’s purple chair, too.

Yesterday, I picked up my sixth copy of Nina’s book.  Life’s losses pile up, it seems.  Daughter. Mother. Father. Father. Mother. Husband.  All lost.  At such times, grief whispers, shouts, screams through the soul.  There is no consolation.  So, I simply place another copy of Nina’s purple chair in a manila envelope for delivery.

My purple chair and I have moved on, reading Kristin Espinasse’s Blossoming in Provence, Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake:  Four Noble Truths for Writers, and, most recently, Gail Tsukiyama’s The Street of a Thousand Blossoms.  A heartfelt wish I carry for all who grieve is that one day they will look up and realize they have, too.

Learn more about Nina Sankovitch at www.ReadAllDay.org. Or by reading Tolstoy and the Purple Chair:  My Year of Magical Reading.