Cozy

 

The cold, along with a little snow, finally came. Last Saturday afternoon, we went snowshoeing down by the Sioux River, just before the wind came up and brought in some seriously chilly air.

 

 

It was a good thing we got outside for some activity when we did. For the next three days, as lows dropped to -20 with windchills significantly lower than that, the most exercise I got was with Shane’s twice-daily walks, significantly abbreviated by the cold. It is abundantly obvious that the weather is far too chilly to be traipsing around when you step outside with your husky and he stops, turns around and gives you a look that says, “Are you shitting me with this?” Our snow-loving dog, like us, spent much of the cold snap curled up on his bed.

I spent the vast majority of my three-day weekend, which evolved into an unexpected four-day weekend thanks to the weather, wrapped in a blanket on the couch, cat draped across my knees, plowing through some really excellent books. I have always been a voracious reader, but the habit has waxed and waned with variations in school demands while I carry out my quest to collect as many degrees as possible. I am currently in a relatively easy class, midway through my soon-to-be fourth degree, so I have the luxury of time for reading. In chronological order, these are the books I’ve read so far this year:

Visiting Tom, by Michael Perry. I love Michael Perry so much. He’s a Wisconsin boy, just a couple hours south of here, and he writes like a dream, beautifully capturing rural Wisconsin life. He’s also funny as hell, with a self-deprecating wit and a complete and total lack of pretension. I want to spend a morning with him at the Edgewater Cafe, eating a greasy diner breakfast and drinking coffee and talking smart. I love his books Population: 485 and Truck: A Love Story very much, and I read everything he puts out. Visiting Tom (subtitle: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace) is about an elderly man named Tom, whose farm wound up a good deal less bucolic than it started out when the state of Wisconsin decided to run Interstate 94 right through it. Tom and his wife, Arlene, have long been surrogate grandparents to Perry’s wife, and he of course had to gain their approval when they first began dating. Now they have that casual but deeply connected relationship that you see a lot in rural areas, doing each other favors, sharing meals, and looking out for each other. This was a good book, but for me, it didn’t match the lyricism and humor in the two books of his I mentioned above. Read those, if you haven’t. They are amazing. Then go ahead and pick this up, too, because while it doesn’t match the other two in my opinion, reading Visiting Tom is still a good use of your time.

The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food and Love, by Kristin Kimball. Kimball was a journalist living in New York, doing a piece on the growing organic farming movement and the young people fueling it. She interviewed a farmer named Mark, they quickly fell in love, and she left New York City to move to rural upstate New York and start a farm with him. Her friends and family, understandably, were shocked and more than a little appalled, but she doesn’t go into much depth on this subject, focusing instead on the first year of the farm as they market their CSA, buy draft horses and cattle, plow and cultivate their fields with said horses, make cheese, plant, weed constantly, and sort of plan a wedding. She does a really fantastic job of acknowledging the romantic view a lot of us have of farming, spelling out the insanely hard life that is involved in fully supporting oneself through farming, and still sharing the moments that are romantic and sweet and appealing. I have to say that the appeal of Mark the farmer, at least for me, was a little less apparent; he sounds like the kind of hippie ideologue who would drive me to drink, but they are clearly in love and their shared struggle to make their dream a success makes for a compelling story.

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. Wow, did I love this book. It’s a dystopian utopia story, where the country has all but collapsed thanks largely to the end of oil, but the general misery is alleviated somewhat by the virtual world of the OASIS. The OASIS provides employment, education, and a massive variety of worlds and experiences for everyone, and access to it is free (though a large portion of travel and experiences within the OASIS require credits, like a video game, that usually must be purchased). When the creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind an announcement that he has hidden an “Easter egg” somewhere within the OASIS, reachable through riddles, keys and challenges, and whoever finds it will inherit his entire fortune and control of the OASIS. What makes this book especially fun, besides the great character development and half-horrifying, half-wonderful vision of the future it presents, is the fact that the challenges generally revolve around 80s pop culture. As a child of the 80s, the creator of the OASIS incorporated a great deal of movie trivia, music and video game skills from that era into his challenge, as well as into the OASIS itself. So the kids who are working to solve these puzzles in 2044 immerse themselves in the culture of the 1980s, memorizing dialogue from John Hughes movies and debating the merits of various Atari games. It’s an absolute blast to read, thoughtful and fun and completely heartfelt. Highly recommend.

Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. Strayed was 22 when her mother died of an aggressive form of cancer that killed her less than two months after her diagnosis. She spun out, spending the next four years destroying her marriage and developing a taste for heroin while shacking up with a punk rock boy in Portland. A friend came to get her and on the drive back to Minneapolis, Strayed decided to hike the Pacific Coast Trail to try and pull her life back into some sort of center. There is the expected haplessness of an inexperienced hiker with a pack too heavy to lift, and the exhaustion and grinding demands of hiking through desert and snowy passes in the Sierra Nevada. There are some entertaining bits of writing in that, and Strayed is just self-deprecating enough to be charming, not enough to be annoying. But the heart of this book is in the honesty of her telling, in flashbacks to childhood, her mother’s illness, the years between the loss of her mom and the hike. She connects with various people on the trail, growing stronger and coming to terms with her losses and mistakes. The writing is fantastic and had me in tears multiple times. But she’s also very funny. In one scene, when she has stopped to spend a couple of nights in town toward the end of her hike, in Oregon, she meets a guy working at a bar. He invites her back to see a band the next night, while he’s working, and she describes standing across the room, knowing that he is watching her, and first feeling powerful, sexy and beautiful, then, as the next song starts, falling into self-loathing, imagining herself as some sort of hideous bridge troll. That sort of dysfunction is unfortunately pretty damn recognizable for most, if not all, of us, which makes it such a wryly amusing scene. It’s a beautiful, well written book and it made me want to get down to some serious writing of my own.

Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver. I’m cheating a bit with this one, as I’m not quite through it yet, but I feel pretty confident in recommending it anyway. You really can’t go wrong with Barbara Kingsolver, and this is among her best. Not a lot of people can make a larger societal point in a novel without sounding preachy, but Kingsolver nails it, over and over again. This book centers around a woman in rural Appalachia, who is hiking on the edge of her family property to meet her lover in a hunting shack when she comes across a valley that has inexplicably turned fiery orange. Unnerved, she turns around and goes home, and as the story develops, it becomes clear that the valley and woods are filled with monarch butterflies that have chosen this spot, rather than their usual site in southern Mexico, to spend the winter months. Ideological battles ensue over climate change, signs from God, logging, and the economics of short-term gain vs. long-range costs. As she always does, Kingsolver handles all of this with an even hand, treating all of her characters with respect and drawing out the story through nuance rather than broad, black-and-white statements. She’s really one of the most talented writers around, and this is a superb book that I am going to go finish as soon as I publish this post.

Winter seems to be finally arriving, and I worked long-neglected muscles this morning with a quick ski, so I feel entirely justified in embracing the predictions of more snow this afternoon with a roast chicken and several hours alone with a book.