Sunday afternoon, when I should have been out in the garden, I was sitting with my feet up, nose in a good book, listening to Rex Murphy’s Cross- Country Checkup on CBC Radio.
Sunday’s phone-in was special, one of a couple he has every year when he invites listeners to tell what books they have enjoyed reading and why.
I’ve never phoned in but if I did, I would tell Rex about two books that I reread every summer and one that I have just finished, which I was reading Sunday afternoon, in fact, that I know I will delve into time and again.
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The two old favorites are Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell and The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery.
I first read Who has Seen the Wind when I was at Carleton University enrolled in a Canadian literature course. Our professor was on an exchange from Tokyo University and told us at our first class that there is no such thing as Canadian literature.
We persevered nonetheless, and Who Has Seen the Wind captured my soul with the first reading, as it has done every year since. Mitchell makes his reader smell the prairie dust, feel the immense space of the open prairie, reach out and try to touch the wind.
I love the wind, particularly the wind of September and early October with the touch of fall in it, and it is this wind I think of when I read Mitchell’s book on a hot day in July.
The Blue Castle is a book I read when I was a teenager. Written in 1926, almost 20 years after the author penned Anne of Green Gables, this is an adult book about overcoming adversity and carping relatives, about standing up for oneself and being true to oneself.
It’s a good read and the fact that the ending is somewhat predictable doesn’t take away from its charm. In fact, I find the book preferable to the often soppy prose of the Anne and Emily books.
My third book, just finished, is From Stone Orchard by Timothy Findley, a lovely if somewhat sentimental read about his life in a 19th century farmhouse in Ontario.
Anyone from the country can relate to this book with its stories of mice and other wildlife, of beloved cats and dogs, auction sales and country life.
From Stone Orchard was so-named, Findley writes, because “stones are our principal crop!”
Many lie along fence lines and in piles. “And then there are the others – the endless uprising of stones that every year’s digging and plowing pull to the surface.”
We can certainly relate to that on our farm. I’ve always believed stones grow over the winter and if we could just find the tap roots, we’d have it made.
