BOOK: A Country Year - Sue Hubbell (1986)

A Country Year: Living the Questions - Sue Hubbell

There are some books that I would never read.  I'm not a fan of nature ruminations.  They tend to the exalted or the sentimental.  I don't need transcendence forced on me.  Who really wants to hear about someone's fantastic walk in the woods?  Birdsong and spiderwebs, dewy grass and a pellucid lake, sunlight striking a glade and butterflies on the wing.  Oh, geez, give it a rest.

I came to Sue Hubbell's A Country Year with a lot of reservations and skepticism.  She's a beekeeper in the Ozarks?  Lives alone on 90 acres?  Has a river and a creek and woods and wildlife?  This isn't promising.

Yet it was nothing like what I expected.  Did she try to make tenuous connections between animal behavior and universal human truths?  Kind of.  She does it half-heartedly, almost embarrassed by it.  Mrs. Hubbell is her most authentic when she gets to the fundamentals: of beekeeping, honey sales, VFW members, trucks stuck in the mud, roofing, her brother Bil, the community panic triggered by a proposed dam, and, as I discovered, pretty much any thing she wrote about after the first few tentative entries.  Or maybe that's when I dropped my caution.

My absolute favorite part of the book, the one that won me over, was her warning about thinking of her life as idyllic.  People, completely unsuited to the life, think they can leave the big city and move out to this remote place and be at peace.  Peace is not tied to place (though I would imagine living in continuous danger has a clear impact on feeling at ease.)  Peace is something you have to take with you wherever you travel.

This book's a keeper.