We’ve been so busy around the gallery getting ready for “Leelanau Landscapes: A Four Artist Perspective” (no, Woody didn’t want a hyphen in there) that I have neglected to announce the show here. The opening is tomorrow, Friday, 11 July, 4-9 p.m. The Wright Gallery on Mill Street and Tamarack in Omena are also having openings, so we cast our net wide with that five-hour time slot, thinking lots of people would want to attend all three shows.
I took it easy last night after dinner and finished SARAH’S QUILT, by Nancy E. Turner. A blurb on the cover compares the story to McMurtry’s LONESOME DOVE, and it certainly struck me as cinematic, but (like McMurtry’s novels and any book worth its salt) it’s much more than a movie script. This is Sarah Prine, after all, the same character we grew to love in THESE IS MY WORDS, the first book about her life in the Arizona Territories. In SARAH’S QUILT, a severe, cattle-killing drought is only the first in a fearsome chain of calamities. Serious troubles within the extended family and hideous sabotage from without call on all Sarah’s strength, and the fact that three men are in love with her seems only to complicate further the hard-scrabble life of the Widow Elliott. “What are you going to do?” she is asked by one of the agents of her troubles. “Keep going. All I can do. Living is getting knocked down time and time again, then standing up time and time again, and once more.” Even the climax is multiple rather than singular, but I wouldn’t reveal the outcomes for the world, even had I the time to write more. When you're tired and feeling overworked and overwhelmed, an evening in Sarah's life puts your own in perspective.
It’s a foggy morning, heavy with dew and the chance of rain for the orchards. Not too much, though—we don’t want so much that the cherries swell and split their skins.
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