More Wendell Berry
This week was a bit of a blur. Work, piano lessons, dinner with my parents, a late night at work, a trip to our favorite used bookstore an hour away--all of these were good things to do, and I wouldn’t have eliminated any of them, but they have all kept me hopping. I’ve finished one book in the past week, and am being really slow with Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter, my current novel. I can’t seem to find a rhythm.
But Hannah Coulter is a good book to be reading when you can’t find a rhythm, because it’s partly about farm life and living by the seasons, whether that means the weather and the regular year’s changes, or the shifting patterns of life. Wendell Berry writes about life in rural Kentucky the way my grandparents talked about it. It’s busy, but nature itself slows you down. You may chafe at the rain, but it helps you in the long run and lets you have a day playing cards. You may spend a long day chopping wood, but you’re breathing fresh air, listening to birds, and leaning your body against the trees. You may be driving a tractor until dark, but you are your own boss, and there’s an old dog in the field with you as you roll over the same ground you’ve tended for your whole adult life, and across the road, there are little girls in the front yard waving frantically every time their grandpa passes. There is sorrow and grief and worry, but there is also a rootedness and a sense that life makes when you let yourself live in the seasons.
I have not always let myself live in the seasons. I want every day to be piles of fun, and I plan too much--both too many fun things to do and too much general planning. I forget almost every year that when school starts, the season is different--less time at home, less leisure--and I’m hard on myself for not being able to do everything everywhere. I identified uncomfortably with Hannah Coulter’s absent children, one almost too busy to come home for his father’s funeral.
This is, of course, also a book about home. It looks at home as a place but also as a way of life, as an essential piece of your identity, all things that have been turning over and over in my mind. One of the most important pieces of home is what Hannah calls “the membership,” which is all the people who are not related by blood but who still look after each other and care deeply about each other’s welfare. They are the most important people in your life, but they are also the easiest to take for granted.
Reading Hannah Coulter reminds me to live and work within the rhythms of my seasons, but to do so within the communities I have. When I love the life I have, and myself in it, then I can love others better and see how our lives fit together, and how I might have a part in theirs too. Hannah’s life, again, reminds me of my grandparents’ lives on their own quiet farms, but they were lives I loved, and her meditation on her own life polishes the beauty in theirs.