Hannah coulter

Our son and his wife gave us this book for Christmas several years ago. She wrote on the inside cover: "To the beauty found in things large and small."

For some reason I never got around to reading it until just recently.

I've read snippets of Wendell Berry's works before. I like his writing. I also admire that he's sort of just a normal person living in rural Kentucky and is a farmer by trade. Many of my friends have raved about him personally as well as his books. I suppose I maybe never picked up Hannah Coulter because the title sounded sort of... I dunno... like a woman's book or something. My mistake. I loved it! I'm also told it's a great introduction to Berry's writing if you're unfamiliar.

This book is a novel, and as happens almost every time I read fiction (which is seldom), I tell myself I need to read more of it. Sure, this is a story about a family in a mostly rural setting, but it's so much more. I love books like this that slow me down, and give me plenty to ponder in my own life.

Let me share just a couple snippets to give you an inkling... This is from the beginning of chapter 8:

I need to tell you about my people in their grief. I don't think grief is something they get over or get away from. In a little community like this it is around us and in us all the time, and we know it. We know that every night, war or no war, there are people lying awake grieving, and every morning there are people waking up to absences that never will be filled. But we shut our mouths and go ahead. How we are is "Fine." There are always a few who will recite their complaints, but the proper answer to "How are you?" is "Fine."

The thing you have most dreaded has happened at last. The worst thing you might have expected has happened, and you didn't expect it. You have grown old and ill, and most of those you have loved are dead or gone away. Even so:

"How are you?"

"Fine. How're you?"

"Fine."

There is always some shame and fear in this, I think, shame for the terrible selfishness and loneliness of grief, and fear of the difference between your grief and anybody else's. But this is a kind of courtesy too and a kind of honesty, an unwillingness to act as if loss and grief and suffering are extraordinary. And there is something else: an honoring of the solitude in which the grief you have to bear will have to be borne. Should you fall on your neighbor's shoulder and weep in the midst of work? Should you go to the store with tears on your face? No. You are fine.

And yet the comfort somehow gets passed around: a few words that are never forgotten, a note in the mail, a look, a touch, a pat, a hug, a kind of waiting with, a kind of standing by, to the end. Once in a while we hear it sung out in a hymn, when every throat seems suddenly widened with love and a common longing:

"In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore."

We all know what that beautiful shore is. It is Port William with all its loved ones come home alive.

And in chapter 20...

I was working at the counter by the sink, not daring to turn around. I was brokenhearted, furious, scared, and confused, crying, and determined not to let him see that I was. I was beating the hell out of a dozen egg whites in a bowl. Why I had started making a cake, I don't know. It was what my hands had found to do, and I was doing it.

And was Nathan sitting over there actually reading the paper? Well, I knew he was holding it up and looking at it. For all I know, he may have been reading it. But I knew too that he was thinking of me. My steadfast comfort for fifty years and more had been to know that I was on his mind. Whatever was happening between us, I knew I was on his mind, and that was where I wanted to be. He was thinking of me, I was sure of that, but he had got ahead of me too. He had dealt with what the doctor had told us even before he had gone to the doctor. And now, in a way too late, I was having to deal with it. Looking back, I can see there was something ridiculous about it. There we were at a great crisis in our lives, and it had to be, it could only be, dealt with as an ordinary thing. Nathan had seen that. For my sake as much as his own, he was insisting on it. But I was too upset to see it then.

My tears were falling into the bowl of beaten eggs and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frothy mess into the sink. I said, "Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?

I couldn't turn around. I heard him fold the paper. After a minute he said, "Dear Hannah, I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will take care of itself."

He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate.

 Phew... even typing it now brings a tear to my eye. Which happened often, for a variety of reasons, while reading this. I found it powerful good. It made me feel good, and, as someone said in a movie once, "It made me want to be a better man." What more could anyone ask...