The attitude of gratitude : Hannah Coulter and I

September 4, 2026September 4, 2026 / Apple Hill Cottage / 6 Comments

I wrote this in 2012, but it seems appropriate to republish it now. Wendell Berry, 1934-2026. May your words and your actions inspire people for years to come…

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry has just shot up to the top of my Best Books I’ve Ever Read List. As a librarian, I’m asked a lot (mostly by kids) what my favorite book is. I always hedge. How can one pick a favorite book, when there are so many great reads, so many books, so little time…

But I hadn’t yet read Hannah Coulter.

Yes, yes, I know. This is supposed to be a blog about the cottage, but the subtitle is the circle of life; if anyone knows how to write about the circle of life, Wendell Berry does. His writing is lyrical, a pleasure to read and savor, yet so truthful as to bring pain… My fingertips ached with the beauty of his thoughts, transferred with such clarity into the thoughts of a woman, Hannah Coulter.

Hannah is in her seventies, a widow who has lost two husbands; she has lived her life on a farm in rural Kentucky, her children have grown up, gone to University, and gone from the farm. This is her memoir, but it is more. It is a mourning of the rural life, lost to modernity; it is a mourning of the loss of community that modernity brings; yet, it is also a celebration of love, faith, trust, and the hopes of the human heart.

I’ve been scraping the paint off the cottage this weekend, and that has given me time to ponder the circle of life. The paint was peeling terribly on this weather-beaten, sun-scorched side of the house, yet the warmth of the autumn sun made it lovely weather for scraping — scraping old paint from siding that was probably put on and painted originally by my grandfather. And then re-sided and rearranged by Michael’s dad, Joe. Yet they never knew that this place made by their hands would someday be also lovingly touched by their children’s and grandchildren’s hands… Here is what Hannah says about that…

“As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort, ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.” Chapter 14, The Room of Love

I remember making applesauce with Nanny, my grandmother, in her kitchen. She was peeling the apples with a perfect stroke so that the peel dangled in one long piece from the apple. I was awkwardly scraping the apple and only getting little bits of peel to fall into the sink. “It’s all in learning how,” she told me gently. “I couldn’t do it when I was young either. You’ll be able to do it with practice.” I think about that every time I peel an apple in one piece.

Education was important in our family. My grandfather and his brother both left the family farm together to go college and become teachers. But Pa was always a farmer; even while working as a principal, and later, as the superintendent, he farmed. Cows first, then apples, then peaches. Here is what Hannah has to say about education…

“The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on. I didn’t see this at first. And for awhile after I knew it, I pretended I didn’t. I didn’t want it to be true.” Chapter 15, A Better Chance

Yet most of us have gone from our home places to the Great Away, and we are inclined to think (or be taught) that it is just the nature of growing up and moving on. Life ever changes and if we are to get on in this world, that’s just the way of it. I know very few who stayed. And now that I am back in my home place, I envy the rootedness of those who stayed. I envy them their place in the community — not their standing or their accomplishments — but their place. Their membership. Here is what Hannah has to say about that…

This was our membership. Burley called it that. He loved to call it that… The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come…The membership includes the dead… The members, I guess you could say, are born into it, they stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it. Or they leave it, as my children have done… And so an old woman, sitting by the fire, waiting for sleep, makes her reckoning, naming over the names of the dead and the living, which also are the names of her gratitude.” Chapter 11, The Membership

I have given up my membership once, twice, three times maybe, and now I am about to give it up again and move back where I started. A circle. A wandering circle. And though I will miss friendships and those left behind, there is also an excitement. And herein, I think, is part of the problem. We are always searching for the new, the exciting, the next big thing. Eve probably picked that first apple and gave it to Adam because she was bored with the same old grapes every day for breakfast. What we know, we know, and it has become the routine, the boring. What has become of steadfastness, neighborliness, rootedness to a place, community? Here is what Hannah has to say about that…

“The old neighborliness has about gone from it now. The old harvest crews and their talk and laughter at kitchen tables loaded with food have been replaced by machines, and by migrant laborers who eat at the store. The old thrift has been replaced by extravagance and waste. People are living as if they think they are in a movie. They are all looking in one direction, toward ‘a better place’ and what they see is no thicker than a screen. The houses in Port William and even on some of the farms are more and more being used as temporary lodgings by people who temporarily, as they think, can do no better.” Chapter 22, Next?

When I was finished scraping the paint from one small section, I found an old brush and began to paint primer over the bare wood. As I was covering over the ugly, patchy, half-scraped wood, I wondered what are the differences between those of us who leave and those of us who stay?
Mr. Berry believes that to our detriment, and perhaps our demise, rural life has never been seen as desirable in society, in education, in culture. Indeed, when one of my good city friends discovered I was originally from Greene County, she shouted, “You’re a Hoopie!” Indeed, when I was in high school, the ultimate insult was to call someone a Farmer. Indeed, when my kids were in high school they shook their heads (as did I) over the kids who were choosing to stay. Here is what Hannah has to say about that…

Oftentimes after it no longer matters whether things are clear or not, they become clear. After not liking school at all, Caleb had got to liking it too much… He liked knowing the things he was learning… He was, maybe you could say, tempted by it. And I know, I can almost hear, the voices that were speaking to him, voices of people he had learned to respect, and they were saying, ‘Caleb, you’re too bright to be a farmer.’ They were saying, ‘Caleb, there’s no future for you in farming.’ They were saying, ‘Caleb, why should you be a farmer yourself when you can do so much for farmers?’… These were the voices of farm-raised people who were saying, ‘Caleb, why go home and work your ass off for what you’ll earn? Things are going to get worse for farmers.’ And they were true prophets.” Chapter 17, Caleb.

We leave for so many reasons — a new chance, new friends, a better job, a better place, marriage, escape — for good reasons and for bad ones. But sometimes we expect that someplace else will be better or different, when we really just need to see in a new way. Expectations, Hannah says, are most often a bucket of smoke…

Life may surprise us, it may not turn out how we expect, but always we are asked to see what is and call it good. And until we stop breathing, there will always be surprises. Here is what Hannah says about that…

“Life without expectations was still life, and life was still good…The world that so often had disappointed us and made us sorrowful sometimes made us happy by surprise. You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light. Under the bare trees the wildflowers bloom so thick you can’t walk without stepping on them. The pastures turn green and the leaves come.” Chapter 19, The Branches.

And as I was scraping away years of dried paint, I was thinking how can I write these things without those who know me thinking that I am being regretful, or feeling guilty, or making them feel guilty? But there is no guilt — just thankful thoughts about what was and what is. And here is what Hannah says about that:

“The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.” Chapter 15, A Better Chance.

Yes, indeed, those are the right instructions…

___________________

Favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis (Nov. 29, 1898-Nov. 22, 1963)

November 20, 2022March 6, 2023 / Apple Hill Cottage / 10 Comments

C.S. Lewis died on the same day that President John F. Kennedy was shot, so the news of his death was overshadowed, at least in the U.S.

Yet I owe my faith to this prolific faith-filled author. Years after Lewis’ Mere Christianity was published, I can credit that book with allowing me to step out of smug intellectual agnosticism and stoop into the humble love of Jesus. Literally.

I was seeing a counselor. She had given me several books to read, and being a good patient (and a librarian) I had read them all and we had had many good discussions on them. Then she told me I should read Mere Christianity. Uhm…Maybe, I said, uninterested. I’d been on the opposite side of Christians trying to convert me for most of my forty-eight years, and I didn’t want to be part of their group.

Then one morning I was the first one at the public library where I worked. I flipped on the lights and stepped into the office and there on the floor was a copy of Mere Christianity. It had fallen from the desk of the employee who was responsible for readying books for the shelves. Her desk was always piled with books; I would never have noticed it if it hadn’t been on the floor right in front of my foot.

Have you noticed how God so often sends us books at just the right time? from *Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis*

Reluctantly I bent down and picked it up. I was still standing there looking at it when Jean walked through the door. It was her desk; I held up the book. “I’m supposed to read this book,” I said, “and it fell off your desk right in front of me.” She grinned. “Well just let me paste the pocket in it, and you can be the first one to check it out,” she said. True to her word, she handed it to me that day before she left.

In the next week, as I read through Lewis’ apologetic masterpiece, I was stunned by his way with words, his thought processes, his genius. By the time I had finished it, he had gently rid me of all my prejudices, my fears, my hesitations about Jesus. Two weeks later, I purchased my first Bible to read it and see for myself. In the following years, I read avidly other books by Lewis–everything from his fiction to his collected letters to his philosophically dense tomes.

So, yes, I have quite a few quotes. Allow me to share some. And please, if you have a favorite that isn’t here, share it with me in your comments.

Quotes from Mere Christianity:

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Nobody can always have devout feelings; and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.

If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

…this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…

An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons–marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying that those things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive…

The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred…

I am afraid the only $afe rule is to give more than we can $pare. If our giving habits do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too $mall.

Quotes from The Screwtape Letters:

When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

Quotes from The Chronicles of Narnia:

But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. The Magician’s Nephew

A dozen different things that he might say flashed through Digory’s mind, but he had the sense to say nothing except the exact truth. The Magician’s Nephew

“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.” Prince Caspian

He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one. The Horse and His Boy

Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country, but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Quotes from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis:

I have been feeling that very much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late and surprised, to the simplest and earliest Christian lessons!

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life–the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination.

Quotes from The Weight of Glory:

For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves.

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

…all of our natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not.

Quotes from Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis:

As to wishing it had not happened, one can’t help momentary wishes: guilt begins only when one embraces them. You can’t help their knocking at the door, but one mustn’t ask them into lunch.

Don’t worry if your heart won’t respond; do the best you can. You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, or you wouldn’t have come to where you now are: and the love that matters is His for you–yours for Him may at present exist only in the form of obedience. He will see to the rest.

Quotes from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer:

Don’t bother much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior.

But the very last thing I want to do is to unsettle in the mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination, the concepts — for him traditional — by which he finds it profitable to represent to himself what is happening when he receives the bread and wine. I could wish that no definitions had ever been felt to be necessary; and, still more, that none had been allowed to make divisions between churches.

We say that we believe God to be omniscient; yet a great deal of prayer seems to consist of giving Him information.

Quotes from Surprised by Joy:

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

So today, I am saying thank you to a saint who went before. Thank you Mr. Lewis, for your words, your faith, your intellect, your humor, your letters, your humility. I think you have brought many thousands to a new faith, to a deeper faith, to Jesus. And we all are thankful.

In defense of the much maligned adverb

July 2, 2018March 5, 2023 / Apple Hill Cottage / 10 Comments

Disclaimer: All adverbs used in this post are used purposefully, joyfully, and ironically.

Adverbs have always been a perfectly acceptable, completely legitimate member of the parts of speech family. Think back to 4th grade grammar: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs…

I’m not sure when the rules concerning adverbs took a turn for the worse. We could blame Hemingway and his no frills school of writing; Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, and Elmore Leonard all famously decried adverbial usage. (King said the road to hell was paved with them…)

It’s fine with me if they don’t want to use adverbs (or semicolons); every writer finds their own voice, their own style. But don’t go writing off an entire part of speech for everyone else. To suggest that writing be simplified into nouns, verbs, and just a few adjectives is to take away nuances, phrases, complexity, and experimentation in writing.

Those who hate adverbs say churlishly that it makes for lazy writing. Instead we must find interesting verbs. And, of course, that is true. Sometimes. But it is always appropriate to vary sentence structure — to write a long, lovely sentence filled with adverbs and adjectives after a short informational sentence. This helps to build tension. Long sentences help to draw out time in a scene. No one (except beginning readers) wants to read short sentences exclusively.

Adverbs encourage lazy writing? Any overused word or word form is bad writing. All words should be chosen carefully and meaningfully, not just adverbs. Adverbs tend to get the blame because overuse is particularly annoying and spotted easily. Is it fair to lay the blame for poor writing squarely at the feet of adverbs?

Adverb haters also warn against using an adverb with dialogue tags, such as “he said lovingly.” This has actually become a form of punning called Tom Swifties. (“I’ll race you across the pool,” he said swimmingly, or “I love modern art,” he said abstractly). But there could be a time and a place and a character who uses this type of wordplay. Well maybe not, but they are fun…

Just to do some research, I pulled a few books from my bookshelves by authors I respect: Annie Dillard (who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek); Elizabeth Goudge’s The Scent of Water (Goudge was a British writer who lived and wrote at the turn of the twentieth century); Many Waters by Madeline L’Engle (who won the Newbery Award for A Wrinkle in Time); and Persuasion by Jane Austen, about whom nothing more needs to be said. Then I noticed that all these authors were women, and the authors above who hate adverbs are all men. Hmmm. So I added a book of essays by Wendell Berry (What Are People For?) — and The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

I turned to a random page-in-the-middle of all the books and counted the adverbs on the page. There are many other common adverbs (that don’t end in -ly) that tell how, when, or where; common adverbs such as more, less, far, near, very, most, never, over, again. Yes. Words we can’t do without. But I only counted the -ly adverbs, because really, I think those are the words that offend the sensibilities of adverb haters.

Four novels and two books of essays by distinguished writers. Here’s the tally:

Madeleine L’Engle — 2 (certainly, northerly)

Annie Dillard — 3 (barely, slightly, apparently)

Elizabeth Goudge — 4 ( tolerably, calmly, only, unexpectedly)

Wendell Berry — 6 (he used fully twice–in the same paragraph repeatedly), cheaply, locally, directly, particularly)

Jose Saramago — 8 (hopefully, only, discreetly, finally, scarcely, barely, stoically, immediately) Obviously, he had not heard about the adverb’s adversities. Of course, Saramago also said “…but how much has also been gained by saying more than was strictly necessary.” Flouting the writerly rule of omit needless words with this one phrase, Saramago reminds us that rules are meant to be broken. Just do it skillfully, and the Nobel Prize for Literature could be yours.

…and finally, Jane. Her characters all wait anxiously, speak sensibly, wish earnestly, appear gentlemanly, observe frequently, admire exceedingly, declare warmly, act politely, look instinctively, and certainly call the carriage immediately.

I’ll take Jane Austen over Stephen King….unapologetically.