Contrary to William Butler Yeats

I think March is the cruelest month. It's a tease; playing with our deepest longing for an end to winter and the coming of warm weather and sunny skies. Today warm sun lights up the white blossoms on the plum and pear trees. I am encouraged - and vulnerable. Tomorrow could be 20 degrees and frost. Who doesn't remember being out of school for three straight Wednesdays due to March snows. How unforgivably wanton with our emotions!

Chili Dog and I walked around our neighborhood this afternoon. Tiny flowers have emerged from the already green weeds along the road. How foolish; how tender; how trusting. March, that old trickster, has not yet shown his hand. I'm keeping my seeds under my hat.

Walking with the Old Ones

I've been reading Wendell Berry, A Place in Time. How I managed to get this far into my life without Wendell Berry is a mystery to me, but I won't be journeying on without him.

Berry is a poet, a novelist, an environmentalist, and a Kentucky farmer - to name a few of his activities and accomplishments. Over time, he has created a fictional place, called Port William, and has written much about the lives and histories of the people who live there. I am looking forward to getting to know them better as I catch up on my reading of Berry.

A Place in Time is a collection of short stories  - not so much the kind of stories we might expect- but more like the family story-telling I grew up with. Family sitting on the porch or eating chicken stew out in the yard and telling familiar stories about the characters and events that have peopled our family history. "Y'all remember when Daddy did so-and-so? What was that fellow's name?" 

Berry's stories are like that. They don't necessarily have a beginning and a climactic end, just an intimate sharing of some day or series of days during which something happened in the lives of the residents of Port William. Many recall childhood and people, now gone, who made a deep impression on their lives.

It's a wistful, late life kind of book. It looks at change; transition; loss and moving on - many times regretting what was left behind and lost.

The writing is exquisite and to be savored. He makes me think longingly of the old ones in my life. The way things used to be, and that the new version is not always for the better.