by Sonja Hakala

Ruth Goodwin paced from her kitchen to her front door to her sewing room and back again. She checked the pedometer she kept in her pocket—251 steps. At this rate, she’d wear a groove in her floor before she’d walked a mile, her goal for the day. The view from all her windows was the same—wind-whipped snow stampeding down from the mountains turning the world outside white and breathless. No one in their right mind would drive or walk in a freezing gale like this.

“Hmph, April is the cruelest month,” she muttered, “and April snowstorms are the worst.”

The storm had already closed the schools, all of Carding’s town offices, and every business in town. Ruth knew that the plow trucks were sidelined because the roads were susceptible to collapse. The frozen earth of winter that supported them had turned to mud a couple of weeks ago.

But today was book club day at the Frost Free Library, and in April, the members shared their favorite nature and gardening books. Ruth always looked forward to that.

Her lights blinked, dimmed, flared brightly, and then went out completely. “Well, I think this time they mean it,” she told her dog, R.G., as she scratched behind his large, flopping ears. R.G., whose name was inspired by the sidekick character Archie Goodwin in the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout, was a stouthearted beagle, a fearless chaser of rabbits and squirrels. His human, Ruth, was an avid gardener and R.G. took his guardianship of her flowers and vegetables very seriously.

Ruth turned her propane heater up a notch, enough to keep her kitchen toasty, then dragged her favorite reading chair closer to the window to catch as much light as she could. If the storm planned on keeping the power out for a while, it was best to save the candles and camping lanterns for use later in the day.

She fingered the short stack of books she’d put together for the book club meeting, pausing at each title, waiting to see if the impetus to re-read any of them stirred her heart. Out of the corner of her eye, she could just see the cover of the latest Laurie King mystery novel beckoning to her, and Ruth realized she faced the dilemma faced by every reader sooner or later. Do you choose to read the book that slides down easy and passes the time quickly? Or do you choose a slow-read book?

Slow-read books are slow-read books for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is that the book bores you but there’s nothing else at hand to read. So you let your eyes wander over the words until something releases you from book prison. Or you’re in school, the book is an assignment, and who in their right mind would willingly read Moby Dick anyway?

Or the book could be dense with ideas and new concepts, decorated with words found in the most obscure corners of a dictionary. But as soon as you look up their definitions, the information they contain disappears like a dropped sno-cone at the beach in August.

Or maybe the book is so good and so magical, you just don’t want it to end so you read slower and slower then sigh with regret when you reach the last page.

When she reached the book at the bottom of her book club stack, Ruth turned her head away. It was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a birthday present from her friend Edie Wolfe who had raved about the book for months before gifting it to her. Ruth had had the book for nearly a year but for the past three months, her bookmark had stayed stubbornly stuck at page 348 no matter how many times Ruth picked it up.

The book was beautifully written, exquisitely written, with prose that made Ruth’s heart sing because here on the page she had met a fellow traveler, a woman as in love with the botanical world as she was. So why was she so reluctant to finish it?

Setting her jaw, she retrieved her birthday gift, and let it fall open in her hands. Many of the pages had underlined passages like this early nugget: “We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”

Ruth had to chuckle as she riffled through the pages. She had been reading Braiding Sweetgrass when she bought her first tin of book darts. Her forest of small metal markers started at page 179 where she’d noted the following passage about harvesting wild leeks: “Woods throughout the country are losing their leeks to harvesters who love them to extinction. The difficulty of digging is an important constraint. Not everything should be convenient.”

“And that is why I never let anyone dig them on my land,” she told R.G. The beagle looked sagacious. He definitely understood.

Suddenly she noticed that the storm had taken a breath. Instead of howling through the trees, the wind now contented itself with whispering loose snow like sand in a desert over the road that passed her house. Hugging the unfinished book, Ruth stepped closer to the window. April storms, particularly this late in the month, were quite rare, and she knew this snow would be gone by tomorrow afternoon. 

“The world is so beautiful,” she said as she watched tiny ice crystals form and re-form then un-form shallow drifts. “It doesn’t have to be that way but it is. So why can’t people love and appreciate what we have been given? Why do they…?” She caught herself as tears stung her eyes, and she looked at the book in her arms, remembering how the exquisite lessons held in its pages had made her smile and cry at the same time. 

“It’s grief,” she suddenly realized. “That’s why I am having such a difficult time reading this book. It amplifies how I feel. I see what is happening to our rivers and the way that winter is no longer winter or summer summer, and how the birds are disappearing, and I am filled with fear and sorrow. That’s what she’s talking about, and it’s why I find it so hard to read.”

She sank into her chair, and Braiding Sweetgrass opened in her lap at the last book dart she had inserted. “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Ruth drew in a long, slow breath, and reached down to stroke her dog’s ears. The snow clouds were now in tatters, and here and there the sun tickled the earth. Still-bare trees cast their skeletal shadows, and a blue jay squawked from her perch at Ruth’s compost pile.

“It’s the only way, isn’t it R.G., choosing joy.” She set Braiding Sweetgrass to one side, her bookmark still at page 348, and reached for her own nature journal instead.

“April 22: We should have had a book club meeting today but instead, it snowed. But now the sun is coming out, and on the ground, you can see the individual flakes stacked on top of one another like small crystal plates. They are beautiful and they give me joy .”

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The Carding Chronicles are short stories written by author Sonja Hakala about the Vermont town that no one can quite find on a map. They feature the characters in the four Carding novels.

The Carding books are available from Amazon and the Chronicles appear here, on this website, every Monday. Hope to see you next week.