Lovesick/Homesick

After coming up for air after reading Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (at a well-worthwhile 925 pages), I've been seeking out shorter works of fiction. Maile Meloy's collections of stories are just the thing.

After reading Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, I turned to her first collection, Half in Love. Ranch girls, a lovesick ranger, a homesick serviceman, and an ice harvester all have a story to be told. For many of the characters, shaped by their environment, weather plays a devastating role. If it's not a blizzard, it's black ice. If it's not winter, it's a scorching, windy heat.

For some reason, stories featuring the hardships of Montana winters are comforting while experiencing a relatively snowless winter here in Michigan. Come February, I may need a different story to read.

A Tax on All Your Closets!

The title of this post refers to an interesting fact I learned while on a tour of this local historical site. The tour guide claimed that a lot of houses of the 1800s didn't have closets because you were taxed for the number of rooms you had. (And due to the fact you sewed all of your clothes, you probably didn't have that many to store anyway). The closet-less house we toured stayed in my mind as I finished reading The Mother Who Stayed by Laura Furman.

Divided into three trios of related stories, Furman examines friendship, different eras of domestic life, and the life of a poet.

Opening the book is a set of stories about a group of families that summer together but don't manage to socialize much when they return to their city lives.

In a story in the second trio, we travel with the biographer of a writer named Marian Foster Todd as she seeks to uncover her lost correspondence. Any story that includes a setting in the library archives has me hooked. I know. I'm weird that way.

In the last set of three stories, Furman references a journal of a mother and wife of 1874. My to-do list for today (go to Kroger, empty the dishwasher) is laughable when compared to a woman who not only canned berries and finished sewing a winter coat but also killed the pigs. And that was just Monday.