Last week, my husband and I were engaged in our usual bedtime routine, he eating a bowl of cereal and me watching the darkness creep across the yard and imagining worst case scenarios, when I asked him, “What if we both die of COVID at the same time? What will happen to the farm?”

We talked about this hypothetical, which he assured me is unlikely, but not so impossible as to rule out more conversation in the morning, and I felt calmed enough to pick up the book I’ve been reading.

It is Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, the story of a woman looking back on her life, and weighing her choices. She grew up on a farm, married two farmers, and raised three children with the hope that one of them would take up the profession. Not ten minutes after my bedtime question, I read the second to last chapter, where Hannah, now an eighty-something widow holding down the farm on her own, is approached by a developer. Spur of the moment, she tells the developer that she wants to create a land trust. Then she tells him that he’s gotten fat. After he leaves, she goes walking in her fields and looks at her land:

It was as familiar as my old headscarf and coat and shoes, as my body. I have lived from it all these years. When I am buried in it at last my flesh will be the same as it, and hardly a difference made. But I have seen it change. It has changed, it is changing, and it is threatened.

I finished the book and wondered if I could recommend it to you. I don’t rush to say I love it. But I bet many of you would.

Hannah’s tale is an interesting one that spools out in an unconventional way, like flipping through an old family photo album — nostalgic and gentle and slightly removed. Early in the first chapter, Hannah says, “This is my story, my giving of thanks.”

I think you would love Hannah. She is resilient, surviving a fractured childhood during the Depression, the losses brought by WWII, and the limitations imposed on women at that time. You will root for her, especially when she falls in love. Here she is talking about Nathan, who “came out of the old time before chainsaws”:

From the time I was first aware of him, I never caught him sneaking a look. He looked at you with a look that was entirely direct, entirely clear. His look said, “Here I am, as I am, like it or not.” There was no apology in his look and no plea, but there was purpose. When he began to look at me with purpose, I felt myself beginning to change. It was not a look a woman would want to look back at unless she was ready to take off her clothes. I was aware of that look a long time before I was ready to look back. I knew that when I did I would be a goner.

Perhaps you will notice in the above passage the one aspect of Wendell Berry’s writing that I found irksome. He does not delve into sexuality other than to clothe it in poetic terms. He is a poet, after all, but I wished he would describe the wetness between Hannah’s legs, and how she weighs it against the complication of starting an affair in a tiny farming community. Instead he writes with a flowery Victorian bent: “We would be given over to a time that would be ours together, and we could not know what it would be.”

C’mon Wendell, sex is everywhere, especially on a farm!

What Berry does understand is the pull of place, the love of land, and the almost mythical allure of a small town. In that regard, he reminded me of Pat Conroy or, dare I say, The Gilmore Girls. “Hannah Coulter” is one of eleven novels that Berry set in the fictional Port William, Kentucky, an insular place where I would imagine “outsiders” aren’t people of color, they’re white people from the Big City. Not unlike the little community where our farm is. Which is to say that my husband and I are definitely “outsiders” here. We, however, have had the great good fortune of help from the best farm family in these parts.

That is a story for another day. Let me just say “Hannah Coulter” is a spare and simple read. In its pages, you won’t find a whiff of the tumult of 2020, nor will you find the typical grit associated with a farm. But you will discover yourself in Hannah’s story, in her faith in humanity, her solace in the land, and her love for life, redeeming life.

Photo of Wendell Berry via The Sierra Club.