Quick! Run to Michelle’s site to enter her book giveaway. That is, you’ll want to try for it if you’re a bride or need a gift for a bride or even if you were a bride 20 years ago.

Michelle and her sister Christy co-authored this book, and I’m so proud of them. To be honest, I’ve not read it from cover to cover–oh yes, I guess I did when it was still a Word document–because it’s not the kind of material I need in this stage of my life. But women who have read it give it rave reviews. And I’m even one of the guest authors, and slipped in a chapter about brides relating to their single friends. So you could read the book just for that chapter. Ha!

It’s a happy memory: Michelle and I cross-legged on her couch, both with a laptop, editing each other’s manuscripts. So it wasn’t professional editing, but there’s nothing like a friends being honest with each other about how to tune up their words.

I believe in the book’s message, and the way that Michelle and Christy come along-side women, and let them feel that they’re not alone. Writing from the middle of their lives as new brides gave them a voice of understanding and credibility. The book is honest, personal, and articulate. I cheer for their vision and the way I see them pour their lives into their own families.

If you don’t win the book, you can contact Michelle: (434) 760-3853, or visit the website to order a copy for yourself and/or a friend. It makes a wonderful gift, you know.

Not being so fond of animals, I never considered picking up The Yearling. I wasn’t interested in a story about a deer.

But my friend recommended it to me after she read it, and she was right. I loved it. It’s much more than a story about a deer. It’s about people struggling in harsh surroundings.  It addresses loss and grief, love and loyalty, and how each colorful, real character responds to those. It even has a wandering sailor character, which made me smile.

Several places in the book made tears creep out of my eyes. I still don’t like the inevitable ending, and when the most dreadful thing happened at the end, I skimmed over it because I didn’t want to know the details.

Like all good stories, it gave insight to how people think and feel and talk and respond to life.  I think that’s why I liked the story so much. It seemed so real. Simple, but deep, and beautifully honest.

I laughed aloud when Jody threw a potato at a girl and his dad lectured him. His justification: “I jest hate her. She made a face at me. She’s ugly.”

“Well, son, you cain’t go thru life chunkin’ things at all the ugly women you meet.” I don’t know why that advice made me laugh.

This is from gentle, wise Mr. Baxter’s prayer when they were ready to bury Fodder-Wing, the crippled boy:

…Now you’ve done seed fit to take him where bein’ crookedy in mind or limb doesn’t matter. But Lord, hit pleasures us to think now you’ve done straightened out them legs and that pore bent back and them hands. Hit pleasures us to think on him, movin’ round as easy as ary one. And Lord, give him a few red-birds and mebbe a squirrel and a ‘coon and a ‘possum to keep him comp’ny, like he had here.  All of us is somehow lonesome, and we know he’ll not be lonesome, do he have them leetle wild things around him, if it ain’t askin’ too much to put a few varmints in Heaven. Thy will be done. Amen.”

Then the Baxter dad and son went home. The dad was talking about the burial to his stern wife who’d buried five babies:

He said, “I never seed a family take a thing so hard.”

She said, “Don’t tell me them big rough somebodies took on.”

He said, “Ory, the day may come when you’ll know the human heart is allus the same. Sorrer strikes the same all over. Hit makes a different kind o’ mark in different places. Seems to me, times, hit ain’t done nothin’ to you but sharpen your tongue.”

She sat down abruptly.

She said, “Seems like bein’ hard is the only way I kin stand it.”

He left his breakfast and went to her and stroked her hair. “I know. Jest be a leetle mite easy on t’other feller.”

It’s a most delicious, replete feeling: I don’t need anything right now, so I can even keep away from second-hand shops. Except that it’s nice to look at the books. Several in town have English books, and recently I found The Boy in Striped Pajamas.  Which is a good read even if it’s an awful, sad story, so of course I bought it for one zloty.

You can always use more books. And chocolate.  I can, I mean. Right now my reads are: A Meal with Jesus  as well as The Yearling, and always, interspersed at odd times so as not to get too tired of it: Polish grammar and vocabulary.

Recently it was The Secret Life of Bees for the umpteenth time. I’ve recommended that book to probably 100’s of  people. Someone took me up on it once and then asked me how I could read something that had so many swear words in it. I don’t know. I don’t remember any swear words. But maybe if you’re sensitive to that, don’t pick it up.  And don’t believe the pish-posh that’s on the jacket–something about divine female power. Their religion was strange, but I read the story for the wise words from August, and for the way that Lily expresses herself in such human, honest ways.  Most of all, I like the way August loves and guides and mentors this mother-less girl in such an exquisite way.  She’s my hero.

I’ve followed Ali’s African Adventures for several years, but now it’s more interesting again, because she and her husband are back on the Mercy Ship, after a year’s break. I love her way with words, the medical details, and emotive stories she writes about the broken babies and women she gets to care for. I once had the privilege to go on board the Logos ship, (no, they’re not sister ships) the one that takes books all over the world, so I can sort of picture the kind of community they live in, the size of the ship, and the international camaraderie and family that happens there.

Sometimes I wish that I would read more high-brow books like classics  or even be more informed about things like Occupy Wall Street. But being of average intelligence and being most interested in real people, I spend most of my time reading and following simple stories that are connected with what it means to live in a beautiful but broken world that is held and healed by scarred hands. It suits me. I don’t need anything more heady.

[Anne, after nearly 60 years, is aboard a boat back to England. She’s talking with an elderly gentleman enroute and they’re swapping stories about their lives.]

He asked: “Were you happy there? There in the mountains?”

She was taken aback. “I suppose it depends on what you mean by happiness. I’ve known moments of ecstasy. There were many, many joys. There were years of desolation and blindness. Years when I prayed to die. But life doesn’t let you do that, you know.”

“I know.”

“Life always asks us to forgive in the places where we’ve been most hurt.”

“Most abandoned?”

“That too. Just when you think it’s over, when there’s no hope, there’s some great surprise. There’s always more. And then you realize that we humans understand practically nothing about all this. All this we live in–as if it were ordinary.”

“Nothing is ordinary.”

“Yes,” she said, and fell silent.

“You were happy then?”

“Yes. I was happy. But not with the kind of happiness most people want. It went much, much deeper. I can’t describe it. It was the feeling that just grew and grew over the years, a current underneath everything, a feeling, a form, a hand that was on my life. A sort of fierce, fatherly love that demanded everything from me but hid itself from me. It had given everything. It wanted total trust in return.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s strange.”

“Like always being alone, but not alone?”

“The feeling was abandonment. It was emptying. No strength. No power.”

“You seem to have survived in good condition, for all that,” he said.

“It made me stronger. I gave everything, you see.”

“When everything’s given, nothing is lacking.”

“But not in the way we want.”

“Right. Not in the way we want.”

“Not in the style to which we would like to grow accustomed.”

“Precisely, Madam.”

“Later, after the worst of it, you begin to understand that you’ve survived. You grow old and you find yourself able to take a walk with a stranger and sojourner and speak with him of the sea.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 3, Chapter 34

[Nathanael and Stephen, grandson and grandfather, are talking about Jonah MacPhale, a cheating townsman.]

Stephen: “I’ve told Jonah MacPhale to his face many a time what I think of his practices. It’s like water running off a loon’s back. He just laughs and calls me a good old mick. But I don’t believe you can give up on people, write them off, you know, like so many do.”

[Then Stephen tells a story about the fighting when he was a young man in Ireland.]

Nathanael: “But it was war. Ireland and England were–”

“War? Oh, yes. Men are always at war with one another. But it doesn’t make it right. You see, when I looked down at that face as they were carrying him off the mountain, I saw something that scarred me for the rest of my days. His head was all busted, but I saw.”

“What, Grandpa? What did you see?”

“I saw my own face.”

“Huh?”

“I looked at his broken face, and it was my face. Do you understand, lad?”

“No.”

“I pray you’ll never have to.”

They sat side by side, unable to move.

“All my life, I’ve despised Jonah MacPhale,” said the old man. “But you see, I was wrong. Each of us chooses one form of betrayal or another. Some betray people. Some betray truth. We kill or steal or twist things up with a gun or a word, and all because we’re frightened little creatures. I can’t abandon Jonah to his fate. He is me, if you can understand, boy. And someone has to be there if his soul ever opens up long enough to ask why or cry for help.”

“You’re too good, Grandpa. He’s a rotten, corrupt sort of person.”

“I’m not good. And it may be he’s not yet doomed.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 3, Chapter 32

[Anne’s sister Emily came to visit from England. They’re catching up after twenty years of living in separate countries.]

Emily: “When I left the Party I was an empty shell. Then I met a good man, and he loved me. His love healed me. And that taught me everything. It’s why, I think, Anne, that the world can only be saved person by person, one by one. It’s the slow way but the true one.”

“You must miss Colin very much.”

“Yes, very much.”

She faced Anne, touching her own heart. “But you see, I have him here, always.”

Anne looked up at the mountain.

“I too have a good man. He loves me, my husband. But I’m not healed. Can you tell me why?”

“I don’t know why. But I know this: the healing begins when you abandon your demands for love and choose instead to give love, no matter what the cost. Madness, isn’t it? But a madness that works.”

“Perhaps for some, Emily.”

“No. For everyone. But first you have to forgive. Can you forgive Stephen for failing to love you as you wish?”

~ from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 2, Chapter 20

[Anne and Edwin, the priest, are talking.]

Edwin: “I could have been the forerunner, even better than your garden variety rebel, a father of the revolution! Pretty intoxicating stuff, and I almost fell for it. In fact, I did fall for it. But it cost a ruined life to pay for my eyes to be opened.”

“Good heavens, have you killed someone?”

“No. Nothing so uncivilized as that. I…well, one can kill the thing one loves in a thousand ways. You can be on fire with passion for its beauty and ignore the hidden truths of a being, a soul. You can do all kinds of permanent damage thinking you’re making a beautiful creation, a free relationship.”

[Later, talking about his living at a subsistence level:]

“The little scraps that are left cover my food and firewood, and there are a few coins in the collection basket on Sundays. In Vancouver I was comfortable, respectably employed, influential…and quite wretched. [Here] I’m poor, but there’s a curious joy in this poverty.”

“Is this not,” Anne said carefully, pausing, “is this not just, perhaps, another romantic dream, this heroic poverty of yours?”

He laughed.

“Romantic? Nope, it ain’t romantic! It’s reality, and most of us don’t like much reality. Exotic images, impressions, good feelings, and above all, the illusion of being in charge, that’s what attracts us. Poverty is helplessness, vulnerability. You discover you aren’t God. You learn to live with certain kinds of pain that won’t go away.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 2, Chapter 18

[Anne] no longer wished to be a person of quality, if by that word was meant a view from immense height upon an inferior humanity. Perhaps she would never cease to be an elitist, she thought, but it would be an elite of the merciful, the lovers of song and story, of children, of beauty, and of truth.

Precisely how that was to be defined and, further, how it was to be transmitted to her children was another matter. There was the immediate question of Ashley and that mind of his, so hungry for ideas. She knew that the fields and forest would teach him a wisdom that no city child could possess. But there was more to life, and she was determined to winnow it out for him. She saved her egg money and ordered volumes of books…

“Mama,” he laughed, looking up from [Gulliver’s Travels] “did you know there are people who start wars over whether you should cut your egg at the top end or the bottom end?”

“Yes, Ashley, I did know,” she smiled.

When he was twelve it The Scottish Chiefs. When he was thirteen and beginning to ask difficult questions about intangible things, she bestowed a copy of Les Miserables.

“Mum,” he said with a voice that was leaving childhood behind, “d’you think there are actually people who hate just for the sake of hating?”

“Yes. I do. I’ve met them. But the point is, Ashley, they don’t realize it. They think they’re improving the world.”

“I find that kind of hard to believe.”

“You will meet many such people in your life. They are sad and tragic. You would do well to avoid them at all costs.”

Stephen [the man] looked up from his old Irish poetry book and said, “There’s another way.”

“What way?” said the boy and the woman in unison.

“Treat them with mercy, but never let them have any power over your heart.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 2, Chapter 2