A New Kind of Country by Dorothy Gilman
I’ve always enjoyed memoirs by authors,
they’re so vivid. Gilman was a particular favorite author of mine growing up. (Her
mysteries feature an irrepressible widow and grandmother in her sixties who is
recruited by the CIA.)
This is one of those small memoirs of
fascinating thoughts and observations. The book begins well after Gilman’s
divorce as her second son goes off to college. She decides to move from
Suburban New York to the coast of Nova Scotia.
For someone who went from her parent’s
home to living with a husband then having two children, the solitude is quite
different. At the same time, there is more of a sense of community in the
little village than she is used to.
One night she goes to bed at 10 instead of
her customary 11, turning out the lights, and her neighbor calls, concerned she
might be ill. “Was she alright? Did she need anything?”
“…there
are some pleasing aspects to this after years spent in cities where one could
die in June and nobody notice until Christmas.”
It was fascinating to me to read of her
experiencing being alone and the things she did living in the country for the
first time in her forties, much as I had experienced them on my own in my
twenties, before I was married and had a child.
The life of a lobstering village is
fascinating, and sad as well. It’s a fruitful and rewarding but dangerous life,
as has always been for men making their living on the sea.
She describes the boats going out en masse
on the first day of lobster season, and the comings and goings thereafter,
along with her first humorous foray to the docks to buy some lobster for
herself.
“One felt that if the economy of the
entire world collapsed it would make no palpable change in their lives; the
affluent years were only a mild surprise in a long succession of government
miscalculations. They would continue to chop their own wood, plant their
vegetables, bake their own bread.”
The book is split between exploring this new
world she is living in, and the inner world she now has the solitude to
explore. She ruminates on one of my favorite topics, time.
“Yet the mystery is
this: that whether we experience time quantitatively or qualitatively, time
hasn’t changed at all, it’s we who have changed.”
I highly recommend this book.
Storymusing.blogspot.com
Review ~ by Michelle Wells
