If I had to choose....

"In the kitchen was the crisis of dishing up, but it was over in a minute: chicken with dumplings like like yellow clouds floating on top, coleslaw in green & white glacier drifts, & mashed potatoes like cloud & snow together were carried in by Emanuela.

Eliza stood in the doorway, untying her apron.

Friends, she said, "supper is ready."

They were 28 at table. Young & old. Oldsters for whom food had a meaning, & young 'uns ~ & in between, those whose hearts had not yet fed, & who could eat on bread or stone, so little were they centred in swallowing, so much in seeing, searching.

Eliza was the minister at the table, but it was a man's place to say grace. Grace was silent, except on occasions like this ~ with Methodists present who liked to hear what people were saying to God." The Illumination ~ Jessamyn West

My book shelves are weighed down & weighed under. Books lie in piles beside sofa chairs & on the coffee table, on bedside tables & atop the stereo. They have followed us from house to house like stalkers & though I cull diligently, still they multiply like some noxious disease.

Many of my favourites were in poor repair when I acquired them, hardbacks I could get no other way, & now so loved they are brittle & battered, their pages yellow & stained with age, sticky tape marks holding torn pages in place, yet even if I could I wouldn't replace them. Old books smell differently, smell better. There is something about turning the pages others have turned, seeing the grubby thumb mark left by a gardener, the coffee stain, the smear of chocolate, lives aligning. Did someone accidentally spit chocolate laughing at the quirky joke I laugh at? Put down their coffee cup anywhere to grub surreptitiously for a tissue hoping those beady eyed children who find mother's tears so funny wouldn't notice she was crying over a book!! Did some other gardener pick this up over lunch delighting in the rush of names: May Duke cherries; Stump the World, a white fleshed peach; the Lucretia dewberry, a wonder for pies & cobblers. Pears, currant bushes, gooseberries, whatever the land could support or fancy demand in the way of fruits, Jess had them.

Jessamyn West's The Friendly Persuasion is cracked down the spine but it was printed in 1946 so can be expected to be geriatric & in need of a little TLC. I hunted for years for a copy of this. I adored it from the moment I first saw the movie; the book is better ~ & though I have read the sequel, Except for Me & Thee, I still don't own a copy.

Why does one love this book & not some other? Why do I own this but not Fox's life, Penn's Fruits of Solitude or Woolman's Journal? My children don't get it. There is no plot. This is a collection of short stories about ordinary every day life ~ ah, but so well written one feels like one is standing in the Birdwell's kitchen smelling the summer ripened peach pies & cobblers, seeing the light glitter on the polished silverware on the table, the rosy hue of the cloth. There is a gentleness to this book that soothes my soul, lightened by such a subtle quirky humour that slides so slyly into the text you almost miss it. It is the picture of a marriage that has ripened to full maturity, bursting with both the sweetness & tartness of love.

"Thee, Elza interrupted him, " is like all men. Thee wants to have thy poetry & eat it too."

As I read, yet again, of life lived along the Muscatatuck before modern conveniences ~ & I sure do love my modern conveniences! ~ what really draws me again & again to this book is that West is a painter. She paints with words. As I read I can see so vividly what she is talking about though it is in the details she chooses to leave out that flesh out the picture. Jess, for example, has a a big Irish tenor's nose ~ I know that about him & everything else about him falls into place. Eliza has plump little hands like birds & I can see her vividly.

Mind you I would love this book for one story alone: First Day Finish. For the full impact it is wise to also read A Likely Exchange, but even without that this is an absolute howler of a story that even knowing it as well as I do still has me laughing out loud till the tears stream down my face & I am hysterical with laughter.

When the day of disaster strikes, or I have to list the 5 things I would take with me to a deserted island, this would be the first thing I grabbed, the top of my list ~ even before my bible. Want to know how to live a Christ like life, this books shows you. The chances of my being able to replace my bible are extraordinarily high. If I lose this book I may never be able to replace it. I'm not taking any chances.