Let’s get to Spring Cleaning!
Let us help you with your Spring Cleaning! Join us as we offer an opportunity for you to drop off your e-waste and shredding here at Solheim! Friday April 21st from 9am to noon. Download the flyer HERE!
Solheim focuses on Volunteers during April! Consider volunteering. Residents will have an opportunity to volunteer in our community as well. Contact Ashley Brayman for more details or visit www.solheimsenior.org/volunteer.
It’s just about time for Senior Proms! More information to come!
In celebration of Solheim Senior Community’s 100th Anniversary this year, the Solheim Book Group continued to join the celebration with a discussion of another book first published one hundred years ago, in 1923, the novel The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson. CLICK HERE to see the list of the ten Bestselling Books of 1923.
The Able McLaughlins tells the story of a family of Scotch Covenantors, who have become the heart of a pioneer Iowa farm community. As the dust jacket from the first edition noted, “Isobel McLaughlin, mother of ten, and Wully, the oldest son, are characters in whom one feels the spirit and intelligence and dauntless courage that carved out our Western States.” The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1924.
The Book Group enjoyed reading The Able McLaughlins, and discussing, among other things, some interesting Scottish words and phrases from the book. We learned that “Lang may your lum reek,” is a Scottish greeting meaning “long may your chimney smoke.”
One resident very thoughtfully observed after reading about the daily life of the McLaughlins, that in the last hundred years, there have been many changes in communication and transportation, but that people’s emotions are the same.
The Book Group will continue to read throughout this Solheim Centennial year books which were published in 1923 or were bestsellers in 1923. The members are excited to be part of this very special Centennial celebration.
The Book Group has selected for its April meeting, The Enchanted April by April von Arnim. The Enchanted April tells the tale of four very different women who escape dreary London for an Italian castle in Portofino, shortly after World War I. The ageless novel compellingly responds to the eternal question of how to achieve happiness in life. An immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1923, the novel features unlikely female friendship, newfound empowerment, rekindled love, and unexpected romance
The Book Group will meet on Saturday, April 15, 2023, at 10:30 a.m. at Solheim Senior Community in the Navigage Room. All are welcome. We were honored this month to be joined by Susan Stark, a member of the Solheim Board of Directors, and avid reader. Copies of the book will be circulating at Solheim. Please ask at the front desk.
The Book Group has also selected for the May meeting another 1923 bestseller, Wanderer of the Wasteland, by Zane Grey, considered the last of Zane Grey’s four Western epics. The book is lengthy, but reportedly a page-turner, so we are hoping readers can get a head start to finish by the May meeting on May 20, 2023.
Please join us in April and May as we celebrate Solheim’s 100 Years, and Happy Reading!