The task: Grab one of your favorite books and post one of your favorite quotes from it.One of the book's I'm reading this hour is The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg. I can't say that it's one of my favorite books, but I just read this quote and loved it:
"In Wyoming people as though winter were 'out there' even now, lurking not in time but in space, being prepared somewhere in a shop or factory, awaiting only final assembly and shipment to the proper address. ... [T]hat talk is a way for people to remind one another of what they've already gone through together and are prepared to go through again -- just part of the cost of being neighbors in a landscape so spare of humans but so full of weather."
Living in the South, we don't really identify with or worry about winter, but this quote made me think of my friends in the North who speak of winter almost as if it were an unloved but tolerated member of their family who comes to visit each and every year -- it's something you'd like to avoid if possible, but resign yourself to having to deal with because you know you don't have a choice. And in that resigning, you console yourself with the realization that the rest of the family has to deal with it as well, so at least you're not alone.
5 comments:
I like that. Out here in California, winter is treated as a surprise or the black sheep of the family.
Very neat quote! Have you read The Meadow? It's a great creative non-fic book set in Wyoming!
I really like that quote!
Eva, no I haven't read that one. I've never been out west either, so it's hard for me to get a mental picture of the area, but I think I'd like it there.
I'll be driving through Wyoming later this year, when I drive from CO to Cali. When I read The Meadow, I'd never been west of Texas, but I could totally see it in my mind's eye. :D
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