Unforgettable: A Deep Dive into The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

You know that feeling you get when you finish reading a book that grabbed you from the first chapter and wouldn't let go until you got to the end and beyond? I'm on that satisfying high right now after closing the back cover of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds. It's the book club selection for our July discussion and I didn't mean to do a reading marathon so soon after picking it up at the June discussion of Becoming Mrs. Lewis. Often when I finish a book so early in the month there's a good possibility I'll forget all but the broad brush strokes of the story---not a good thing when trying to contribute to a discussion. I doubt that will happen with this historical novel. For one, Kristin Hannah is fast becoming one of my favorite storytellers and two, this book is set in a time frame in American history that is as fascinating as it is horrible in terms of human suffering: The Dust Bowel of the 1930s and the Great Depression. 

Hannah's expert research and writing had me sitting right next to the characters as a dust storm turned the sky black and blew hundreds of centipedes inside the Martinelli farm house along with the dust, and left everything outside covered in dust so thick it drifted and changed the landscape. I felt the hopelessness of Elsa as she tried to milk a starving cow that bellowed in pain as dribbles of dirt-colored milk came out. I wondered how anyone could go on living out of a broken down car sitting in a migrate encampment where every day they had to walk for several miles looking for a job that paid as little as 40 cents for 10 hours of work. I was right there with Elsa as she'd cut a single hot dog into thirds to feed herself and her two kids and count out beans in a can for their dinner. 

Several reviewers called Hannah's style of writing in this book 'visceral' and I had to google it to find out exactly what that means. Artificial Intelligence defines it as "…to write in a way that evokes a strong, gut-level, emotional response in the reader. It's about tapping into the reader's deep feelings and instincts, rather than just their intellect." Say what you want about AI but that definition nailed how I felt reading this book. 

Most of us have probably read The Grapes of Wrath back in our distant past, being a popular reading assignment in high schools and colleges back in the day. Written in 1939, John Steinbeck captured the migration of the "Okies" from their bank-foreclosed farms but it didn't cover the environment crisis that caused the Dust Bowl to happen. Reviewers of The Four Winds are drawing parallels between what caused the Dust Bowl to what is going on now with climate change and in terms of the human suffering that will come in our near future if better angels among us don't find a way to turn things around. As I usually do, I don't read reviews before I read a book, I read them afterward to help me focus in on what I'll talk about in book club. I must admit I didn't see those parallels while reading the book, but I do see them now that they were pointed out. 

Farmers in our bread basket states back during WW1 were told they would help win the war if they produced more and more wheat. So they didn't rotate their crops and they took the wind barrier lines and native drought resistant grasses out between fields causing the top soil during the drought season to get blown as far as the ships in the New York harbor. With the top soil gone and and no rain, crops could no longer grow. It took a government program that eventually canceled their defaulted mortgages, paid the farmers to stay on their farms and work together for several years to restore the land so it could produce crops again. It will take that same kind of government investment, and a commitment in clean energy, to turn the temperature down on our climate. 

West with the Giraffes, one of my top five favorite books, is another well researched historical novel set in the same time frame and I thought I had a clear picture of what life was like during the dust storms, the droughts and the migration of homeless people going west. But The Four Winds took me to a new level of empathy and understanding…thanks to that visceral writing the reviewers talked about. The resilience of human beings to live through such hardships truly is amazing. 

My parents where born in 1911 and lived through the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918/19, World War I, The Dust Bowl years, the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. They both lost their mothers at ages eight or nine, my dad's mom was burying in a mass grave during the Flu Epidemic. But my grandfather went on to raise three kids on his own. He was a coal miner living under the same "company store" system that the many migrates did during the Dust Bowl when they reached California. He got paid in store credit and got laid off long enough to used up their credit before the mines opened up again---or in the case of the Dust Bowl migrates, when the fields were ready to be planted or picked. It was a system designed to keep the workers enslaved with no way to save money to find a better life. 

< rant on > Without the Labor Movement and help from the federal government we'd still have masses of people living in extreme poverty. And yet we have too many short-sighted people in our government right now who are willing to throw people back into that kind of hardship by taking basic health care and pubic assistance away. We can not get complacent with the state of country and its leadership. We must continue to make our voices heard. < rant off > 

One reviewer said that The Four Winds was about hope. After losing everything the people who make it through hardships beyond their control are the ones who could still hold on to hope for a better life in the future. In my own family history, I can document that kind of hope. To get out from under the company story system my grandfather grew potatoes and sold them to the only other grocery store in town and he saved that money up until he had enough to buy a train ticket north for his oldest son, 15 or 16 at the time. That boy, my uncle, got a job in a furniture factory here in Michigan, saved his money to help bring my dad up to join him in the furniture factory where Dad made twenty-five cents an hour as newly minted teen. My dad, uncle and grandfather next saved enough money up so my grandfather and aunt could leave the coal mining town. This all took several years but progress happened because hope for a better future endured. © 

Until Next Wednesday.

Cottages, Funerals, and Echoes of the Lives We Build and Leave Behind

If blog posts are a slice of life then this post is like an entire pie because I crammed enough stuff into this past week to last a month. If you asked me what kind of pie I'd say it was a fruit pie because my activities were chunky and chewy, not smooth like a cream pie. I'm not really a pie person---I prefer to eat cake instead---but if I have to pick a favorite it would lemon meringue. My mom used to make them from scratched which I suppose was the norm back in the '40s and '50s when I grew up. She made fruit pies in season, too, and we had an unlimited source for wild huckleberries so mom made lots pies and cobblers that were guaranteed to turn our teeth temporarily blue. 

Cottages and Memorial Day go together like peanut butter and jelly. The one I went to over the holidays has been in the family since I was two years old. It's an easy drive straight south of town, no way to get lost which at my age is a dreaded sign no one wants to see. It happened to my dad in the early days of his dementia and it happened to my brother. So far I've only gotten lost once, two years ago but it was in an area of town I never go to so I didn't punch a hole in my Old Person's Card with that incident. It's getting lost when going places you've been to a thousand times before that count. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. 

Opening day at a cottage is when you put the docks in, blow up the water toys, bring out the cushions for the screened-in porch and start restocking the kitchen for a simple meal of hot dogs on the grill, potato salad, chips and dip and this year my niece made chili---I'm guessing because the weatherman whispered in her ear that it would hit the spot on the cooler than normal holiday. Anyway, I brought a store bought apple pie as my contribution. Her family is not big on sweets and I've yet to figure out how to hit a home run with a dessert that pleases them all. I also brought store bought peanut butter cookies for the kids. Recently I dug out my mom's old recipe for peanut butter cookies, thinking I'd like to make them because I remember them as being so much better than store bought. One look at the ingredients and it was easy to figure out why back in the day when no one cared about sugar, fats and carbs, her cookies were a favorite with everyone. They had a cup of shortening, a cup of brown sugar, a cup of white sugar, a cup of peanut butter and three eggs in each batch. Still, it's a goal I set for myself before I die, to make a batch of peanut butter cookies from scratch. I've got a bad habit lately of setting goals to accomplish before I depart this world and I need to take a deep dive into that self destructive behavior one day, but not today.

Also this week I went to a funeral of the daughter of a woman I've known since the day she was born and that's a long time considering she's only a year or two younger than me. Her daughter was only 54 years old, died of cancer but she did more in her short life to add goodness and positivity to humanity than I've done in my 80 plus years. She was a teacher and the service was standing room only. It doesn't seem fair, the way someone with so much to give, dies young and suffers at the end while someone like me who tends to be a tad self-centered keeps on going like the Energizer Bunny. I left the funeral home being proud of my friend for raising such a great daughter but by comparisons feeling like I've wasted too much of my own life. We were summer friends who spent a great deal of time together growing up. Our parents were life-long friends but she took the giving nature of her own mom and passed it on to her daughter while I took the lessons passed down from my folks and kept them mostly to myself. 

At another party this weekend---one given by a great-nephew from my husband's side of the family and where the desserts literally numbered in the double digits---I was sitting next to a niece-in-law who has MS and, like me, never had any children. She's been in a wheelchair since her late 20s and hasn't had the easiest life. She looked around at all her nieces and nephews and out of the blue she said, "I'm glad I never had any kids." Her reason for thinking that is because during the years when her friends were all having babies, she said it was all she could do to go to work each day. She was so tired and didn't think she had anything left over to give. She figured any kids of hers wouldn't have turned out all that great. 

I also wonder from time to time how any kids I might have had would have turned out. Some people will scoff at me for saying this and call it apples and oranges but I was a good mom to my fur babies and I think I would have approached motherhood the same way I approached raising them to be well behaved canine citizens. I would have researched how to do whatever it took to be a mom including I would have even applied myself to the dreaded experience of learning how to cook. But would I have been as devoted to any kids of mine the way my mom was to my brother and me? I can't imagine me being completely void of the self-indulgent person I know I can be. Or did the self-indulgent part develop organically from having more time on my hands than my cottage friend had whose daughter just died?

I ended the week with what they were calling a Spring Fling here on campus, a party that was arranged and paid for by the daughter of a fellow resident. They come from money and spent lavishly on this party. After two glasses of wine I was ready to call it a night and that's when I got a call informing me that the husband of my best friend since kindergarten died. I'm in the season of my life when I buy sympathy cards by the box---and there I go again, making it about me instead of the loss of my friend's soulmate. But she has dementia and her husband was her caregiver and if I think too much about what is ahead for her and her sons my heart will break. At times like this I haul out the Scarlett O'Hara line from Gone With the Wind, "I'll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day." ©

Until next Wednesday.

P.S. The title of this post was generated by Artificial Intelligence. How do you think it did? ChatGpt is fun to play with. Thanks 'Awkward Widow' for introducing it to me.

 

Memorial Day and Book Club Selection - Becoming Mrs C.S Lewis

I call myself a wanta-be writer therefore I need to crank out a blog post whether I'm in the mood to do so or not. That's what writers do…no excuses, bang the keyboard until it squeals in protest. It's Memorial Day weekend but over the years I've written over twenty posts with that theme so I'm pretty sure I've covered not only the history of the holiday itself but all the years I've decorated graves of ancestries I didn't know, the years of going to lake parties with my husband's family, the two-day mini vacations my husband and I took along Lake Michigan and, of course, the first few years I was a newly minted widow back then I was one. In more recent years I've attended the memorial services put on by the residents here on my continuum care campus. I didn't go this year because 1) I have a doctor' appointment at the same time and 2) I was glad I had a conflict so my heart and head didn't have to battle it out over going, or not. I'm not proud of my country right now and singing patriotic songs would seem hollow and insincere. 

We have a lot of veterans living here and I've heard their stories----some poignant including a widow's whose husband was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War and some stories almost apologetic because the veteran didn't see any action. The POW was in the same brutal prison camp as John McCain and another woman living here actually wore a POW bracelet with McCain's name on it. He wasn't famous back then but it's still an amazing story to tell. Even more amazing because she's a MAGA Republican and I've thought about asking her what she thought about 45/47 besmirching McCain's military record by claiming he was only a war hero because he got captured. "I like people who weren't captured," he said. To refresh our collective memories McCain was flying a bomber that got shot down and he was ejected from the plane, landed in a lake where the locals where waiting to take him prisoner. How would President Bone Spurs have escaped from that scenario, I wonder?

This past week I've become a recluse, avoiding all contact with my neighbors. Not for any particular reason other than I was involved in a couple of activities that were relaxing and satisfying. I was working on a custom paint-by-number of my great-great-nephew while listening to a book on my Kindle. It's a book club selection titled Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Cathahan. It's a methodically researched, historical fiction about a friendship that turned into a love affair between C.S. Lewis (best known in America for his Chronicles of Narnia series for children) and poet Joy Davidson. I've never read anything by either author but I'm always curious about books that presume to explain a writer's methods, where their ideas came from and their work ethics. In this case there is plenty of documentation that Patti was able to access and after reading the Author's Notes in the back of the book I'm awed by the research that when in to this novel. Though in reading the reviews I learned that opinions of the book swing wide in book club circles. Our discussion comes next Monday.

If you've ever read the Narnia Chronicles to your kids I'm sure you would like this book on a deeper level than I did. Even so, it held my interest. Fans of his books and her poems will love the frequent quotes that Patti uses in their dialogues and the descriptions of the actual locations that inspired Lewis. Christians will also enjoy some of their discussions---she was an atheist at the beginning of the book and Lewis was well known for his apologetic religious writing. I didn't know what an "apologetic religious writer" was and in case you don't either here is how google explains it: "It involves providing arguments, both positive and negative, to support a specific religious faith and respond to objections or criticisms. Apologetic writing aims to make a case for the truth and value of a particular religious system, often using logical reasoning, historical evidence, and philosophical arguments." Lewis and Davidson were pen-pals for several years before meeting in person and they debated topics too deep for me to care about. But Patti Callkahan is a skilled writer who had a good sense of how much religion she sprinkled in the pages. I finished the book neither converted nor offended. Silly me, at first I thought maybe the universe was putting this book in my path to convert me before I get too old to know the difference between milk and orange juice. 

After finishing the book I tried reading quotes from The Chronicles of Narnia looking for some that might seem familiar, things that might have seeped into every day life the way lines from Lewis Carroll's children book Alice in Wonderland or Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz have. Do people of a certain age go around quoting lines from Narnia, I wondered, like I've done all my life with lines from Oz? If there is, I couldn’t find them.

Lions, and tigers and bears, oh my!

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

There's no place like home.

And there is no better place to spend Memorial Day like the cottage where I spent the first 18 summers of my life. And that's where I'm going today after I finish this post. We'll grill hot dogs, eat potato salad and apple pie followed by the Opening Volley of Summer---putting the dock in the lake. How was your Memorial Day weekend? ©