Living Multiple Lives

First, though, a few words about milkweed—and a couple of images. Nothing smells sweeter. The perfume is as sweet as puppy breath, not quite as delicate but every bit as soft. The milkweed is blooming out in a section of our meadow, as well as in front of the old bark-covered corner building that housed Dog Ears Books from 1997 to 2000. One local passer-by (we were passing by at the same time) was not charmed by the sight of WEEDS downtown. “Oh, but smell it!” I exclaimed. “It smells so beautiful!” She sniffed delicately. “It does smell nice, but you’re probably the only one who appreciates it. You and the monarch butterflies.” Then she noticed the bees and added, “Look how happy the bees are! You and the butterflies and the bees!” That’s good company, isn’t it? I put in the garden on the corner but learned to leave the milkweed for the monarchs, and some others in town did the same. Once anyone comes to appreciate their critical importance to monarch butterflies, these weeds start to look beautiful. I do wonder, though, about toxicity to grazing animals. If, for example, we were to have horses or cattle and needed pasture for them, would we have to eradicate the milkweed, or would they just leave it alone? I’ve only started to look for the answer to this question, and so far it doesn’t look as if common milkweed presents the problem for horses that wild cherry does.

Now, on to books:

I’m so eager to dive into THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE that the anticipation makes a sharp taste in my mind, but I’ve been holding back, out of self-discipline. That is, already deep into the real life (biography) of logician Kurt Gödel (INCOMPLETENESS) and the fictional life of Sarah Prine (the novel SARAH’S QUILT, sequel to THESE IS MY WORDS), I want some kind of closure with these lives before immersing myself in yet another parallel universe, especially one 562 pages long. Part of the pleasure of fiction or biography or memoir, after all, is living vicariously someone else’s life, seeing the world from inside that person’s head. Well, maybe not exactly so in the case of Gödel, but even there at least it is immersion in a different time and milieu.

Self-discipline has limits, though. During a few quiet moments in Dog Ears on Sunday afternoon, I yielded to temptation and dipped into an old book translated from Norwegian, NORTHERN SUMMER (1937), by Gösta af Geijerstam. After all, it’s only a little book, 120 pages with wide margins, so surely, I rationalized, it won’t take any longer to read than a magazine--not much of a rationale, as the NEW YORKER and the ECONOMIST come at me faster than I can keep up with them this time of year. But that title, NORTHERN SUMMER! This little book speaks to me of my own life, partly as it is but largely as I imagine it could be someday. I picture myself growing old and turning into Marthe, the milkmaid, who didn’t want to go to the Old People’s Home (this “little old woman,” the author says, is “about seventy”) but preferred to keep working, doing everything she could. And:

“…she could milk, she could shear sheep, she could rake hay and lay it up to dry, she could even mow the hay, if she had to. She could do everything that had to be done on a little farm, as long as she could do it in her own way. She scurried around like a little gray elf, looking after everything, big things and little. Nothing must get lost, or go to waste. And she always had something to do. When she would be walking through the pasture, she would always stop to break up with a stick any piles of cow-dung that lay along her path, and spread it out evenly on the ground, so that the grass beneath should be nourished by it and not crushed in one spot.”

Hay mowing on the little island in the fjord was done by hand, quietly, with a scythe. The small island farm boasted two cows and a calf, chickens, ducklings domestic and wild, a kitten and a pig. There were apples and cherries and fresh-caught fish. Thrush, woodcock, cuckoo. Primroses. At night would appear in the sky the “Poor Man’s Star.” This star was “large and brilliant and looked like a fire on the horizon,” signaling that the hour was very late and that shelter must not be denied to any wayfarer.

With all the charm of this book came lagniappe in the form of an old, yellowed newspaper clipping tucked between its pages. On one side of the paper is a review of NORTHERN SUMMER, while the reverse side reviews a new (at that time) book by M.F.K. Fisher, SERVE IT FORTH, under the feature title “About the Various Pleasures of Eating.” The first sentences remind me of my first experience reading Fisher. The book I read was MAP OF ANOTHER TOWN, about Aix-en-Provence, but I too with that book had the feeling of encountering a very unusual sensibility. Here is the first paragraph of the review of SERVE IT FORTH, signed only with the initials K.W. (and there is no identifying the newspaper from the clipping, either):

“This is a book about food; but though food is universal, this book is unique. The first adjective for ‘Serve It Forth’ must certainly be ‘different.’ And as one reads on the mind takes note again and again of that different quality, and is charmed and shocked and entertained by it, in what the author has to say, and in the way she says it, and even, too, in the quaint illustrations scattered through the text. This is a delightful book. It is erudite and witty and experienced and young. The truth is that it is stamped on every page with a highly individualized personality. Sophisticated but not standardized, brilliant but never ‘swift-moving’ or ‘streamlined,’ perfumed and a little mocking, direct and yet almost précieuse, the style of ‘Serve it Forth’ is as unusual as its material is unfamiliar and odd.”

K.W. precisely catches M.F.K. Fisher’s distinctive tone.

Turning back to the Geijerstam review, I see it is the same reviewer, and here K.W. wraps up by saying, “In this simple and sensitive narrative, translated into English which itself is both spontaneous and beautiful [the translator was Joran Birkeland], the touch of reality is as light as the flicker of birch leaves in the sun, and as joyous and as clear.”

What other books appealed to the mysterious K.W.? I wonder because I suspect that I would like those books, too.