Doorknob, a photo by TheRichardsons on Flickr.

Since my photos from flickr seem to have issues with the aggregator, I’ll post my photo assignment here, too. I don’t think this is really extreme enough but it’s the most extreme my camera will do.

Another powerful piece of historical fiction from Geraldine Brooks, Caleb’s Crossing is the story of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard in 1665.  The narrator is Bethia Mayfield, resident of Great Harbor on Martha’s Vineyard, who has some basis in the original settlers of the island, the Mayhews. But, as with her novel March, much of the story is imaginative as Brooks describes the friendship of Bethia and Caleb.

While that relationship is fictional, Brooks uses her significant skills to depict Colonial America with its focus on sinners in the hands of an angry God. Bethia’s natural curiosity and desire to live a full life leads her to blame herself for any number of ills that beset her family and friends.  Yet, she revels in the natural wonders of the island and the descriptions of the natural world bring that island to life.

The story has one tragedy after another, most of which are historically accurate.  Caleb dies just after his graduation while the other Native American student is killed in a ship wreck prior to his own graduation.  Death is very much a character in this novel. Yet, despite all, there is an uplifting message.

Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead has a quiet strength that arises from the character of its narrator, John Ames, a minister in a small Iowa town who is writing a letter to his young son.  Ames, whose only son was born in his old age, wishes to speak of his life, both temporal and spiritual, to a boy who will have little memory of his father.  It is a rambling narrative that goes back at least two generations to Ames’ grandfather, a radical abolitionist minister who worked with John Brown, and then his father, a pacifist minister, who struggled with his own faith, eventually leaving the church and the town.  Ames also discusses his relationship with his best friend’s son, a young ne’er do well who returns to Gilead seemingly to make his peace with Ames and his own father.

All these complicated father and son relationships are seen through the lens of Ames’ spiritual reflections.  It is not a novel to be read quickly and I found myself going back to immerse myself in his lessons about why and how to believe.  His ideas are fresh and new even as they grow from his long life as a small town minister.   He is a man comfortable with his own doubt and that of those around him and he offers pragmatic advice for how to live a religious life in a complex world:

So my advice is this–don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all.  They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them. That is very unsettling over the long term. “Let your works so shine before men,” etc. It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to the effect.  I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are not your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

The natural world plays a role in this novel as well from a moment of epiphany with his own father from his moments in the dark sanctuary of the old church as he prays and dozes and wakes to the light of dawn streaming through the windows.

This is a novel to put on the shelf until you find yourself in a spiritual mood, ready for contemplative prose and a story of struggle, love and forgiveness.

Despite having a wonderful library in Williamsburg, I rarely darkened the door in the past decade.  I am a book buyer rather than a borrower. It hasn’t always been that way.  I’ve been a library volunteer, and in my commuting days–pre-Audible and ipod–I often stopped by the library to check out audio books, but once I worked from home, it just seemed like a chore to drive downtown. And, frankly, I was something of a snob: I was not interested in being on a waiting list for a book when I could just order it from Amazon or download it from Audible.

But the local library in our small town has great appeal. It is within biking and even walking distance of the house.  It is small with somewhat odd hours.  It has taken me some 10 months to finally stop by.  But today, I pulled into the parking lot and headed in for my card.  I left with Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing, Norah Jones’ Seems Like Home CD and an indy film called Lebanon, Pa.  (My parents live about 10 minutes from Lebanon so it seemed like kismet.)

It is a small shop but they are part of a regional network so books can be ordered online and delivered to my branch.  There are comfortable sofas, racks of magazines, free wifi, and Internet connected computers.  I’m imagining pedaling over to drop off books and browse the shelves…once better weather arrives, of course, since it hardly made it above freezing today.  Meanwhile, I am looking forward to settling in with another Brooks novel, this one based on the life of a 17th century Wampanoag Indian.

There were a few folks there, using the computers, looking for new books, and it felt good to be part of the community in this way.  My only regret is that they don’t have a reading group. There is a book group at another branch in the larger town with a good grocery store.  They are reading State of Wonder by Ann Patchett for January.  Patchett’s been in the news recently with the opening of her book store in Nashville.  Maybe it’s a sign?

I haven’t read Little Women for at least a decade, maybe two, but I remember it being a heartwarming novel with plucky characters. Geraldine Brooks’ novel, March, takes its basic story from that beloved novel but does not offer the same heartwarming pluckiness. It is a dark book, but in it darkness, we learn about the depths of evil and despair to which the human spirit can descend.

The title character is the March patriarch who is largely absent from the original novel as he ministers to troops during the Civil War. The first person narrative moves from past to present, written in convincing 19th century prose and providing glimpses into the world of Concord, where luminaries like Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne debate the issues of the day while slaves huddle in hidey holes waiting to move along the Underground Railroad to Canada.

In March, Brooks has created a complex character whose good intentions lead to unintended consequences. As he surveys the violence and death around him, he is stunned by his own culpability and wonders how he can move back into the world of his loving family. And at points, I wondered the same thing, finding that I didn’t really like him all that much but then discovering that it was because I was pulled in by his own beliefs about himself. He is human being with all the conflicts and paradoxes that we each bring and unlike the sometimes flat characters that I remember from the original novel, here is a rich portrait of a man.

But he is not alone in this novel: we meet his wife both through his own eyes and her own words. She is equally complex, struggling with her own demons as she tries to understand how her husband has been changed by his experiences in the South.

The portrait of Southern life is grittily real as slaves struggle to maintain some semblance of a life in the midst of the horrors of the plantation system. Small glimmers of hope are extinguished in brutal ways and yet they continue to hope and plan even as the war grinds on around them.

Brooks takes some license with history that may offend Civil War purists, but her resource section is full of first person narratives that help provide the human element of this historical novel. It doesn’t hurt that she is married to Tony Horwitz, a Civil War historian and once lived near the Ball’s Bluff battlefield that provides the opening scenes of the novel. She may not get the dates exactly right but her poignant story helps us understand the the humanity that makes the past so difficult to pin down.

The new year brings endings and beginnings…

My father’s oldest brother, Ted, died yesterday in the early morning hours, drifting away in his sleep after a year of declining health. He was 87 years old and while we grieve his passing, we have a sense that it was his time. I’ve been fortunate to spend some time with him over the past few years. We’ll have a memorial service in the new year when my sister and I can both be present.

Meanwhile, we have brought a new puppy into our home. After a week of suffering from a leg injury that kept him incapacitated, Major is back to being a puppy, full of life, exploring everything, and after sleeping through the night for the first time last time, he went on his first leash walk today. He went on the early morning dog walk with Spot and Tina and trotted along, aware of the leash but not fighting it too much. I hope that bodes well for the future. I think he will certainly liven up 2012.

According to Library Thing, I read 33 books this year. It’s definitely a low for me. I usually get closer to 50 and last year got close to 75 as part of a challenge. It’s a testament to two things: moving to the farm and getting stuck with a couple books.

While the move to the farm has been great for the books–they are breathing freely on the open shelves for the first time in at least a decade–it did not leave a lot of time for reading. I try to get a few pages in each night but am so tired, I usually fall asleep after a few paragraphs. I have found a few afternoons to curl up in the window seat as the sun sets across the front yard with the same result, dozing off in the rays that slip through the magnolia leaves and reflect on the silver roof.

As I look at the shortened list, I see that I got really bogged down in American history, maybe as a result of the move to an antebellum home. Biographies of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington go along with commentaries about both the American Revolution and the Civil War. It took me all summer to plow through McPherson’s one volume history of the latter, not learning that much more but somehow wanting to connect with the past.

I have been reading fiction as a backlash to all that history. I’m halfway through my second Franzen for the year and finding The Corrections a little less accessible than Freedom. I read two by Pat Conroy and enjoyed them although I often found them ponderous and over written even as I bathed in the lushness of the language. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel was the best “found” book as well as the quirkiest. And then there were just fun books: Georgia Bottoms, which my mother has passed around to all her friends who have loved reading a “dirty” book, Must Love Dogs, A Red Herring Without Mustard.

I have the audio of the next Flavia deLuce just waiting for my road trip tomorrow. I’ll bet the rental (my husband was hit by a deer) has a connection for my iPod.

What’s on the reading horizon for 2012? Another attempt at not buying books. I have shelves of unread books that called to me at some point: Edwin Way Teale on the seasons, Wendell Berry on living an authentic life, and lots and lots of fiction. There are 43 books on the To Read list in Library Thing so maybe that’s a good starting point. A good friend recommended Gilead so perhaps I shall start with that once I endure Franzen’s angst and dysfunction. It can be wickedly funny and tragic all at the same time.

I usually don’t write a typical Christmas letter, preferring instead to jot short individual notes in each card. With the advent of social media and email communications, many friends both near and far know what we are are up to whether through Facebook status updates, flickr photos or the blog. As for old family friends, aunts, uncles and cousins, my mother makes a good social network node. But I suppose there are folks who are busy living their own lives without time to have much interest in mine.  So if you haven’t been following along, here are the highlights.
We started the year in the same small 1920s bungalow in suburban Williamsburg that we had lived in together since we married nearly 20 years ago. We ended the year in a two-story, rambling 1850s farmhouse in rural Virginia. It came with 18 acres that we hope to cultivate in various ways from pick-your-own berries to farm stand produce to a few pigs and cows.

We started the year with one old dog–Tina Turner the beagle mix still graces our lives–and ended the year with three dogs. Tina welcomed Spot, a large lab/terrier mix, in early April, and just recently, Major, a stray beagle/lab mix puppy probably born somewhere on our property adopted us. I’m still longing for two cats to hang out in the library but we’ll get past raising the puppy first.

2011 saw some major change in our lives. While we miss our Williamsburg friends and neighbors, we are having a great time on the farm. Bob is harvesting gorgeous vegetables from cucumbers to greens to soon-to-be red cherry tomatoes from the sun room that runs along the southern side of the house. We’ve put in some gas logs so we will be cozy this winter since all the chimneys need lined before the fireplaces can be used. We would love to have you visit us here in Waverly. We have a lovely downstairs guest room with its own bath.

We both work from home so usually one of us is here. Feel free to just drop by. We can’t promise it will be dust free but we would love to see you despite that. You can also keep up with us at http://www.bottletreefarm.com.

Our best wishes to your for a peaceful holiday season and a new year full of joy and love.  And just for fun…enjoy some Christmas karaoke!

I’m not completely sure what happened to November.  Between prepping for the conference and hosting my family for Thanksgiving, it was a crazy month. The conference ended earlier this week and we have no travel plans until Christmas.  So, I can get caught up on cleaning, organizing and writing.

The house is mostly decorated for Christmas thanks to my mother.  My folks visited for a week early in November then came for a few days before Thanksgiving and while my dad refinished two tables, my mother cleaned and decorated.  This is a GREAT house to decorate, from the lighted tree in the front window to the garland on the staircase.  And after having NO mantles from which to hang stockings, we now have four downstairs and four upstairs.  I wonder how Santa decides which chimney to use?

Getting heat going was a major concern.  The furnace works but it is pretty inefficient so we had propane lines installed and inserts put into three of the fireplaces, including the library which is our main hang out room.  It is toasty warm and the heat rises to the upstairs bedroom where we sleep.

Today was a “dog” day.  I walked my two early this morning and Spot was overly excited by some smell down near the silo.  His hackles were up all along his spine. Then, we saw hunting beagles tearing around the front yard and field, their owners in hot pursuit.  We helped them catch one and they said that something had spooked them, gesturing towards the back of our property. Hmmm…we’re wondering about coyotes although Bob has also mentioned a bear.  Better keep my eyes open on those early, pre-coffee walks!

The other dogs that were part of the day are now tucked into the dog crate in the back of my truck, waiting for animal control to open on Monday.  It’s a mother beagle and her adorable puppy that somehow ended up under our lumber pile.  We’ve seen her before but she has always run away and we know she had at least two other puppies earlier this year.  Today, we managed to catch both of them only to discover that the dog catcher won’t come on the weekend unless it’s an emergency.  It is tempting to adopt them, but I’m letting my intellect rule my emotion.  Four dogs would be too many and I’m not prepared for a puppy.  The local farmer who helped us get them from barrel to crate thought she might make a good hunting dog so we have a small bet that he will come back to retrieve them tomorrow.  Meanwhile, they have food and water and the truck will certainly be warmer than outside.  I’ll check on them before I go to bed.  One of the perils of living in the country is that people let their dogs run and aren’t always great about getting them spayed and neutered. But I can’t adopt every stray that wanders through…my two are both rescues and maybe someone will find a soft spot for these two. I’m still holding out for two cats.