Friday, January 12, 2007
Making plans for the big freeze
Libba Wolfe
Libba Wolfe's column appears twice monthly in Extra.
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It takes more willpower than I can muster to settle into winter hibernation when the weather is so mild. I stayed in the yard instead of baking Christmas cookies. The decorations are still at the foot of the attic stairs because I keep buying bags of sale bulbs and puttering around the garden.
Surely there will be some snowy cold days to tidy closets (doesn't the word "tidy" make it sound like a quick job instead of a huge project?) and reward myself with hours of reading.
If you're looking for some good reads ...
My tattered collection of Barbara Pym's books has never made it to a bookshelf. I keep the books stacked next to the bed in the guest room. When I wake up in the middle of the night I head upstairs to my good old friends.
Pym's characters lead G-rated lives in the small villages and neighborhoods of London in mid-20th-century England. She treats them with humor and kindness while exposing their flaws and prejudices. Haughty bishops and humble curates, bossy wives, middle-aged spinsters fussing about jumble sales and altar guild duties, lazy Oxford professors, fledgling raincoat-clad anthropologists -- Pym creates a world where most problems are laid to rest with a "hot milky drink" before bed. I've re-read them many, many times.
One book I'm embarrassed to say I'm not re-reading but reading for the first time is Annie Dillard's "A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."
Dillard won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for the book she wrote while living at Hollins College. Night and day in all seasons, Dillard studied the small world on the banks of Tinker Creek. It's a book that describes what she observes, but mainly it is about learning to see. About being still as the natural world reveals secrets about itself and about ourselves.
For Dillard, living in the present is the result of "the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object." Whether she is studying a praying mantis on the windowsill, the splendor of a giant sycamore tree or the play of light and shadow across the water, she practices "receptiveness and total concentration."
"Let me see" was the daily prayer of David Brendan Hopes when he was a child. Now a professor at UNC Asheville, Hopes tromps the Smoky Mountains and calls himself a born observer. In "A Sense of the Morning" he writes about the miracles that surround us -- that ARE us. All things that live and that we depend on to live are related. He says, "I used to go out looking for gods and now I go out looking for family. ... We are children of the same house, the first house, and the only."
Awe, reverence, comfort, exhilaration and terror -- Hopes finds them all in the natural world. For me, the "take-away" from his book and Dillard's is the determination to be a better observer.
This past fall my husband and I spent an afternoon at some friends' farm at the foot of McAfee Knob. It is a lovely spot with gorgeous mountain views. Our host gave us a tour of the property. It was not pride of ownership that lit his eyes. It was sharing the privilege of seeing what he has come to know so intimately. He has picked a spot and is practicing seeing everything that grows and roams and calls his home "mine too."
Whether it's a mountain range, a creek, a farm, a nearby park or your small back yard, it's waiting for us if we just stop and take a good long look. Now is a good time to start.
Last week I read about operationpaperback.org in The New York Times book section. It's hard to write about good books and the leisure and safety to read them without thinking of our soldiers overseas. Check it out to see what you can do.
