Learning "The Language of Flowers"

Victoria spent much of her life in foster care, until Elisabeth. Elisabeth was determined to make this volatile young woman her daughter. Then something happened that ended the relationship, but we don’t know what. Now Victoria is turning 18 and is aging out of the group home she’s been living in.
What do you do when you are alone in the world with nothing to your name, expected to somehow create a life for yourself? Victoria turns to the only thing she knows or cares about—flowers.

Elisabeth taught her the “language of flowers”—the meaning that Victorian lovers assigned to flowers as they used them in covert communication. Victoria uses her knowledge of flowers to find her first job, and she sends messages with flowers even though she knows that no one will get the message. But then someone does.

The Fab 5 read The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, and we couldn’t put it down. We really liked the characters, and the whole flower thing is pretty intriguing. The author has had foster children, and she has some idea of what it takes to love a child who has been hurt and traumatized. She also knows a great deal about the foster care system, something we don’t know enough about. There is some mystery about Victoria’s history, and as a reader I was drawn into the story.

But it did seem to us that perhaps she created a sort of composite character, combining the stories of lots of people, because it seemed difficult to believe that all of Victoria’s history could happen to one child. This did not stop us from appreciating and enjoying the novel.

There was one portion of the story that Nancy felt dragged a bit, regarding a new mother who suffers through a difficult period of nursing a baby. You can refer to my last post to remind yourself that some children truly are slow nursers, and it can feel like forever. So we were not all in agreement on that point.

We were all in agreement on one issue—the story wraps up a little too neatly and quickly. Yet we were all satisfied by it, even though we knew we probably shouldn’t be.

Neland ladies get down and dirty with "The Dirty Life"

In the memoir, The Dirty Life, by Kristin Kimball, a young, single Manhattanite journalist interviews an organic farmer, and they fall in love. Somehow she finds herself moving from her SoHo apartment into heavy labor on a farm that uses horses instead of tractors. That transformation is as amazing to her as it is to the reader.

The Neland women had an evening of memories talking about this book. For one thing, we found out that at least three of the dozen or so women there had grown up on farms, and many more had grown up in farm towns or had relatives with farms. I, on the other hand, have basically zero connection to the soil. I did visit a pig farm once in high school, which was a very educational moment for this city girl. This disconnect may be why my garden beans look so poorly, and it may explain a few of the shudders that came over me as I read the book.

Actually I really liked it, and so did the rest of the group. Kristin and, more to the point, her eventual husband Mark, were very ambitious. They decided to begin a new community organic farm that was sustainable and which would provide everything the members needed—milk, eggs, meat, flour, veggies, fruit, etc.  Many of us use or have tried CSA shares of farms. I just have one question--if you have to spend so much time educating people on what to do with kale because they don't really like it, why grow so much of it? But I digress.

We all got tired just reading about farming—milking cows, weeding row upon row of vegetables, tapping the sugar bush. They would fall into bed at the end of long days of work—ew—without energy for a shower.

Alice remembered milking cows every day and the sort of rhythmic comfort that you could take in the routine. She also wondered how it could possibly take 2 hours to milk one cow. Rebecca and I, who have mothered slow nursers, just nodded knowingly.

Those who know about such things talked about the dirt and the smell of a farm, how hard they are to get rid of. They also talked about how good fresh vegetables and milk taste. Some found it hard to change to store-bought milk; others didn’t seem to notice the difference.

Deanna remembered moving onto a farm in late middle school, and going through the same adjustment from city to farm with mixed feelings and completely new experiences.

All of us had some feeling that Mark would be a difficult man to be married to. He seemed very rigid, like things must be the way he envisions them. No one seemed to think they could live for any period of time with a composting toilet in the middle of a shabby apartment.

But, on the other hand, the man could cook. And Kristin could write about cooking. The combination made me think that even I might try a tasty liver. But never—seriously—a cow heart or, ahem, "prairie oysters." Nuh-uh. And Holly pointed out that there are moments where he capitulates to Kristin’s wishes immediately and with no questions asked. They seem perfect for each other.

We laughed about the idealization of her newfound love at the beginning of the book, where she wished that every woman might have the chance to be with a man who has never smoked, gotten drunk, or slept around. That doesn’t seem like such a lofty goal to the many of us who are married to such men.

But for all the laughter, Kimball writes beautifully. She uses lovely metaphors that bring you right into the farm. And the wedding, which seems such a crazy affair, is something I would love to go to someday. Mark has a vision for farming that takes in the sacredness of creation and the relationship of humans to the earth. The book and Kimball's writing made the dirty life seem like something to dream of and strive for, helping us reconnect with some of our agricultural pasts.

The Secret Lives in "Silver Sparrow"

I've gotten very far behind in posting the books I've been reading, so this week I'll be doing some marathan blogging to try to catch up a bit.

The Fab 5 Book Club met, oh, some time ago, to talk about Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. But first we ate some great Mexican food, from a restaurant that was closed by the health department shortly thereafter. We’re not sure whether we should be sad or grateful that we escaped with our lives.

We also talked a bit about pet-sitting. One upcoming vacation prompted the need for a rat-sitter. Then Nancy mentioned that she once did some cat-sitting for a friend, a friend who left a sticky note on every conceivable surface with instructions about the cat, the food, the way the toilet flushed, etc. Cat people may respond here in their own defense, but it seems there is something about anyone who owns multiple cats that puts them under the shadow of suspicion.

But about the book. Dana and Chaurisse are sisters, but only one of them knows it. They share a father, James Witherspoon, and Dana has spent her life as the product of his secret marriage. Chaurisse, on the other hand, is the daughter of his public wife and has lived a pampered, sheltered life. The book is written from Dana’s perspective in the first half, and the second half comes from Chaurisse.

All of us were caught by the story, wanting to know what happened. We spent some time wondering what it would be like to find out that your father has a whole different family. And what it would be like to grow up knowing that. Children look to their parents for their identity—to find out how much they are loved, to try to figure out where they fit in the list of parental priorities. Daughters look to their fathers for the male perspective on themselves, and they watch their parents’ interactions to find out what marriage might look like for themselves.

To grow up as part of a secret family, your needs always second to that of the public family, means that you are not first priority. But on the other hand, growing up in a secure family with no knowledge of the other family, makes your life and the love you’ve experienced a fraud. It’s a fascinating puzzle to consider.

Identity is a huge issue for everyone involved—a man who doesn’t want to work for anyone else, his brother who looks white but is not, and two women who may or may not be beloved wives. The book points out how much of our identity is shaped by our relationship to others and how we are perceived.

On top of that, Jones sets the story in 1980s Atlanta, which had us all think back on jelly shoes and Add-a-Bead necklaces. Okay, I’m the only one who knew about Add-a-Beads. Must have been a southern thing. There were some cracks in the 80s description—I can’t think of anyone who was fashionably sporting a tube top in the mid-80s—but still kind of fun.

The biggest downfall for us is that none of us could quite understand how the character of James Witherspoon warranted all this female attention in the first place. While it is still missing something to make it great, it is an interesting, well-written story.

Looking forward to "That Old Cape Magic"

As we planned our East coast camping trip this summer, I looked up fiction that had something to do with Maine or Cape Cod. One title popped up under both subjects, That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo. He’s the author of the Pulitzer-winning novel Empire Falls, which is a book I really enjoyed, for lack of a better word. Empire Falls is not a happy book; it’s actually quite depressing. But I absolutely loved Miles, the main character, and I felt like I could breathe the air of the dying mill town that he lived in.

That Old Cape Magic is about a couple married for 30 years; Griffin is still in love with Joy. They go back to Cape Cod for a wedding, with the plan to revisit the place they stayed on their honeymoon, the place where they mapped out their future together. Cape Cod is also where he vacationed for many years as a child. The familiar setting stirs memories of his summers there and, particularly, the atrocious parenting (and education about marriage) he received from the cynical academics who were his father and mother. He thought he'd left all that behind, but it seems that his parents have left a larger mark on him that he believed.

This novel is about Griffin and the parenting he received, but mostly it is about marriage. Russo is a master of detail, especially the contours of a relationship. He plays out the daily irritations that grow into bigger things, and he explores the ways that you can know someone so well—every facial expression, every freckle or scar—but not every shadow of the heart (if you need more explanation just listen to “The Stranger” by Billy Joel). He names the perversity that we are all susceptible to--doing exactly the thing that irritates or hurts the one we love most, even as we know we are doing it.

As in Empire Falls, there is much genuine brokenness in this book. And I can't say it's particularly friendly to religion in general. But there is something weirdly satisfying about having familiar, human disappointments and temptations named and described so well, like reading your old diary.

And since he’s very rooted in the places he writes about, his descriptions of the Maine coast and particularly Cape Cod make me eager to get going—without the bad parenting, of course.