The Nature of Things

This is the fifteenth in Louise Penny's Three Pines Armand Gamache mystery series. She produces a new one, regular as clockwork, every summer. Her multitude of fans, among whom I count myself, await them impatiently.  The bane of long series like this one is that their plots tend to become formulaic and predictable. Somehow Penny has avoided this. Each new entry seems to break new ground and deal with the current state of the world. In A Better Man,  she explores as she has not before the deep physical and psychological damage that domestic violence does in long-term effects on the personalities of victims. And she examines the damage that the unbridled hate expressed through social media does to the fabric of society.  Moreover, it is not just the human on human violence, both physical and psychological, that play an important role in this plot; the violence of Nature is the backdrop of it all. It is April, "the cruelest month", and Quebec is experiencing catastrophic fl...

This is the second "island" book I've read this summer, the first one being Summer of '69 by Elin Hilderbrand . Both of them are winners. The island, in this case, is Block Island off of Rhode Island and the characters are lonely and unconnected strangers who come together there one summer and change each other's lives. Some of them are permanent residents and some are summer visitors but they are all looking for something while hiding secrets from the world. Joy Sousa is a single mother of an adolescent daughter who has painstakingly built a business which supports her and her daughter with very little financial assistance from the absent father, who has remarried and has another daughter. Joy's business is a bakery that specializes in whoopie pies, but this summer her empire is being threatened by a food truck that has come to the island and has proved very popular with the islanders much to Joy's chagrin. Anthony Puckett is a New York writer who had pr...

Here's a poem by Robert Frost that I don't recall ever having read until last week. It tells the story of a house in the country that burned until only the chimney stood, while the barn across the way survived. What touched me about this poem is its last stanza. When I was growing up on the farm, every year we had Eastern Phoebes that built their mud and straw nests under the eaves of our house. I enjoyed watching them, although my mother hated the mess they made. As soon as they were gone in the fall, she would clean it all up, and in the spring the birds would be back to build anew.  Frost had undoubtedly experienced the phoebes building their nests on a house. They enjoy living in close proximity to humans. His last stanza addresses the phoebes' tragedy in contrast to the birds who had their nests elsewhere. For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept The Nee...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Scissor-tailed Flycatcher image courtesy of allaboutbirds.com. The Scissor-tailed Flycatcher is one of the more spectacular members of the flycatcher family that, for the most part, stays on the drab side of the color wheel. I'm not sure if that long tail serves any other purpose than ornamental, but it certainly makes the bird unmistakable in the field. Many Scissor-tails spend their summers with us but they will soon be leaving us to migrate to their winter homes in Mexico and Central America. *~*~*~* The current administration in Washington seems hell-bent on reversing all the hard-won protections that have been put in place for the environment over the years. Here are six of the major reversals they have announced. The loss of these regulations will leave our water and air and land much dirtier and the people who live on it sicker and shorter-lived. *~*~*~* It is feared that Hurricane Dorian has been the final na...

My husband read this book recently and recommended it to me. I had just featured one of Wendell Berry's poems in my Poetry Sunday post , so I decided to put it ahead of the other books in my queue and read it. Nathan Coulter was Berry's first published book. It came out in 1960. It was also introductory to his "Port William" series which now stretches to ten books, the latest of which came out in 2012. It's a very short book, easily read in one sitting, or, as in my case, two relatively brief sittings. The book tells the story of the coming of age of a teenager named Nathan Coulter who lives with his older brother, Tom, and his parents on a farm in Kentucky. The major crop of the small farm is tobacco. The time frame of the events described is never really made clear but it seems to be perhaps sometime in the 1930s. It's apparent that this is a very poor area and the people who live there, the Coulters and their neighbors, are just barely getting by. The book...

I am working my way through the Vera Stanhope series by Ann Cleeves and what a pleasure it has been! Cleeves has created a strong, credible, relatable female protagonist in DI Vera Stanhope and her technical proficiency in creating an excellent balance of puzzle, character, and setting keeps our interest alive as she methodically builds her story. Moreover, the unlikely murders in this particular entry are plausible because they are grounded in recognizable small communities. The relationships in those communities create lots of tension and plenty of red herrings. Misdirection and creating red herrings is another area in which Cleeves excels. This story takes place during a hot summer in the Northumberland coastal area. It begins with Julie Armstrong, a single mother of two teenagers, having a night out on the town with friends. She arrives home very late to find her troubled son, Luke, dead. He has been strangled and laid out in a bathtub filled with water, covered in flowers. She rus...

As the poem of the week this week I offer you a throwback. I first featured this poem in 2013. It is actually a favorite of mine and I have thought of it often recently as I have needed the peace of wild things as an antidote to the daily chaos of our national life. ~~~ Sunday, August 18, 2013 Poetry Sunday: The Peace of Wild Things Almost forty years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to the writing of a man from Kentucky named Wendell Berry. He thought that, with my interest in Nature, Berry would be a perfect fit for me. He was right. I have frequently dipped into Berry's writings over the years since then. He is a prolific writer of essays and poems, all of which have at their foundation the idea that people need to live at peace with their environment. As he wrote in 1969, "We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assump...