Reading on the porch.  Birds land on the wooden wagon, dipping into my improvised bird bath--a bowl with water set in the wagon. A cardinal perches on the wooden handle and the others scatter.  Boss of the birds.

Reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, I remember the years I learned to read with a pen in my hand.  Pen, tea, and book (not even reading glasses yet)--the necessary set up for reading.  Also a notebook to keep notes for the essay I'd write about it later.

Before I learned to read with pen in hand, I read for plot and companionship. I still do.  But after discovering reading with a pen, I'm also on a search for the writerly equivalent of a painter's brush strokes, color, and composition.

By the time I started a master's degree (ironic title for a woman) I already had two children.  I could read their temperatures with my hand, no need for a thermometer.  I could read their moods with a glance.

But this was a different kind of reading.  The pages were still, unlike children, and you could go back to other pages and make lines and arrows and circles on them.

I felt like a literary detective on the lookout for clues: images, words, and phrases that stopped me in my tracks, sentences that opened up something.  Writing essays about literature taught me to pull at threads, see what connected to what, find the underlying patterns.

The Handmaid's Tale yesterday, the follow up Testament today, are dystopian novels by Margaret Atwood.  The subject matter is dark.  But I don't want to turn away, as I sometimes did when watching the movie version of Handmaid.  I read certain passages again and again, noticing the artistry of restraint.  The spaces on the page are fuller than spaces ever are on a screen, leaving room to pause and think about how certain unthinkable fictional actions are similar to unthinkable ones in the world today.

In Handmaid's Tale, religious zealots take over the government.  There is no diversity of religion or philosophy.  Everyone has to believe exactly what the people at the top tell them to believe.

If you want to survive in the new order, you have to do as you're told, especially if you are a woman, worthless except for your ability to bear children for your commander's wife, to be fruitful for them and multiply, for them.

The hierarchy is unquestioned.  Obedience is required and the punishment for disobedience is death.  Only the people at the top matter.

One thing leads to another.  Once a person is de-personalized, she is treated like a disposable object. Democracy is replaced with authoritarianism.  The Constitution is replaced with the authorities'  literal reading of the Bible.  Reading and freedom and asking questions? Absolutely forbidden.