Ordinary Places

“The thought of loving your enemies is opposite to war. You don’t have to do it; you don’t have to love one another. All you have to do is keep the thought in mind, and Port William becomes visible, and you see its faces and know what it has to lose. Maybe you don’t have to love your enemies. Maybe you just have to act like you do. And maybe you have to start early.”

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

I finished Jayber Crow this month, and it is definitely one of my top books for this year, maybe one of my top books ever. It’s a quiet, literary story in which Jayber tells about his life in his own words.

His words are lovely, and his life is beautiful in its ordinariness. 

The book is set mostly in the tiny town of Port William, Kentucky, and from the first pages, I felt like I was home. Wendell Berry writes beautifully about this state, with obvious love and the voice of his homeland. I immediately recognized Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie and Burley and Matt. These could have been people from my own community or from my own family.

I grew up in a community very much like Port William, except there was no real town--just miles of farms and scattered houses and one tiny general store down the road from the old elementary school my parents attended right beside our church. It was an insular community--everyone knew everyone else, and people judged you based on who your family was. I loved it as a child and got out fast as an adult...and then slowly made my way home, finding the wonder in all of it again. Jayber’s path back home really resonated with me.

And his life, from the lovely moments to the sad and back again, is full of beauty. One of the things that made the story powerful was Jayber’s consistent reflection on his life and what it means, on who and what he should be, on what he learns about faith and love, and on what he learns about home. This slow growth is centered on taking time and quiet to think about meaning and life and is cultivated by the slower pace of life in his rural, southern community.

Although I was born in a community like Port William, I first became conscious of this slower pace that also was the backbone of my own life as an adult, when I joined another teacher in taking around twenty high school freshmen to Washington, D.C. and New York City. We were all incredibly excited to explore new places, but our tour guide was frequently frustrated with our little group. She wanted to give us a thumbnail sketch of what we were about to see, ratchet through, and then zoom off to the next site, and the other schools in our group seemed to find nothing wrong with this. But we liked to see things and then talk them over to help us decide what we thought about them, preferably over food, before ambling away to anything else, and the difference between our approach to new things and theirs was surprising to me. Now, years later, as I live portions of my life the way the tour guide dashed us through NYC, it is a relief to consciously slip back into those older rhythms and to set aside quiet space to let myself think, grow, and change.

Living more slowly helps me appreciate what this book had to say about love and about community. When I was younger, I just wanted to escape this place. But now I’ve started to learn that when I get frustrated with my people, I can either dismiss them all as fools who would be better off if they listened to me, or I can look around at my own little community and just recognize the people I love, who have been there for me and disagreed with me and loved me right back. Right now, I’m praying for a woman I mostly lost touch with years ago, and thinking of other high school friends. I’m considering the cords that connect us no matter how far we go or how little we speak. I’m thinking maybe it was supposed to be this way, this easy recognition of old friends and caring for each other in the best ways we know how.

We love when we realize that how we are alike is more important than how we are different. I don’t do this well every day. But when I can, I know it’s a hallmark of home.

Thank you, Wendell Berry, for reminding me.

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