photo c/o Christie's blog |
I’ve always heard you should write the book you want to
read.
I’ve always thought, easier
said than done.
I love to read everything from Virginia Woolf to Agatha
Christie, but I don’t see myself following in either woman’s literary footsteps.
Today, I’m convinced the advice is solid but a little too
broad. We can’t write every book we want to read, but our reading loves and our
reading disappointments will point us in the right direction.
I discovered my direction when I realized how many of the
stories on my bookshelves are told according to the pattern of the shifting
seasons. These were some of the first books I learned to love, books like Tasha
Tudor’s A Time to Keep which
celebrates twelve months of seasonal traditions and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden in which the drama of
winter becoming spring is mirrored in the lives of two children.
One Christmas, I was given the heavy yellow boxed set of
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House
books. I reread every one until the spines cracked and the pages splayed, but I
read Farmer Boy most frequently of
all. This fictionalized autobiography of Laura’s husband Almanzo tells its
story according to the seasonal rhythms of a northern New York farm. From
winter’s deep snow and popcorn by the woodstove to pulling a block of river ice
from the icehouse for homemade ice cream in summer, Farmer Boy made me hunger for seasons I never fully tasted growing
up in a central Texas prairie town.
Today, I live in an old farmhouse in Pennsylvania, and that
long-ago hunger is satisfied in snowflakes, daffodils, zinnias, and fiery maple
leaves. More than that, the hunger and its fulfillment became the dominant
themes of the book I wrote about our first year in this beautiful, crumbling
old house called Maplehurst.
The book is Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons.
Here are a few more of the “four seasons” books that inspired my own:
A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell is a classic of this genre. Once, Hubbell was
a married city-dweller who worked as a university librarian. In middle age, she
finds herself living and working alone as a beekeeper on a remote farm in the
Ozarks. These essays are quiet, contemplative, and slow, but they are also
sharp, witty, and observant. I love this book because it reminds me that one of
the most important things we can do in this life is to know a place, to love it
well, and then invite others to see it through our eyes. That place might be a
northern city or a Midwestern mountainside, but I know that I am richer for
having seen the Ozarks through Hubbell’s eyes.
First published in 1967, TheShape of a Year by Jean Hersey is a vintage gem. I think I bought my
hardback copy for one dollar plus shipping. It’s worth fifty times that.
Hersey was a garden writer, and this book observes the four
seasons on her rural Connecticut property with curiosity and joy. This is a
book all about the simple pleasures of the seasons. There is less human drama
here than in Hubbell’there is always
something happening.
s chronicle, and some might complain that nothing much
happens, but Hersey knows what everyone with eyes to really see the world around
then has discovered:
I love every memoir in Madeleine L’Engle’s series of
Crosswicks journals. The IrrationalSeason, ostensibly book three though these don’t need to be read in order,
begins with Advent and is shaped by the traditional calendar of the western
church.
I appreciate L’Engle’s commitment to asking difficult
questions. What I discover in all her books – but in the Crosswicks journals
most of all – is that unknowing is not a scary place to be. L’Engle shows us
that we can sometimes experience God’s presence in more beautiful and more
comforting ways when we take the time to sit with the questions we do not have
answers for.
Also, L’Engle’s family home, Crosswicks, has been described
as a “farmhouse of charming confusion.” That, right there, is everything I hope
for my own home. We have the confusion down pat. The charm is a work in
progress.
Christie on the Web:
These Farmhouse Bookshelves (blog feature)
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