Living the Questions

A lost life in reading

The Wild Plum is blooming in the Ozarks right now and the hills are filled with their delicate blossoms. I captured these right before the last hard freeze.

I’ve just finished the memoir A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell about her life in the Ozarks. She kept bees all over her county and sold her honey as far as New York and Texas. Driving her big lumbering white truck and sleeping in the cab because the honey business isn’t lucrative to small operators. She documented the wildlife and the coming of each season with an unblemished eye. She saw what I see and it was wonderful to experience it through her viewpoint.

I looked her up online to see if she was still living, but no, she had died in 2018 from dementia in Maine. I can only assume she went to live with her brother or son. I felt such a loss after reading of her death. How does dementia kill? Do you just slowly forget how to function? Does it always mean that you have to leave the places that you have loved so carefully and closely?

I’m always a little at a loss when I read an author who might still be living, but I then find out has died. Usually in some terrible way. When I first read Richard Brautigan I couldn’t get enough. He had been prolific in the 1970’s and I was reading him in the early 1990’s. I thought surely he was still living. His masterpiece Trout Fishing in America or the wonderful Watermelon Sugar was so contemporary.

Well, you know what happened to him. He died of suicide in 1984. I was so sad to know that about him and for us who would never read his future work.

It happened again about that time when I was deeply reading Thomas Merton. I was finding my way through contemporary Buddhism and he was part of that voyage for me. He seemed to embody that touchpoint of the West and East in a way I related to so easily. Only after reading every possible piece I could find did I realize that he had died a tragic death in a tub. I will always feel like his voice is missing.

When it’s sunny I’ve been trying to spend a little time outside each day with Franklin who just loves any time in the elements.

I know you may be thinking that of course we read books by authors who are no longer living. And I read those books too, but I know, ahead of time, that they are no longer living. The shock is when you are happily reading through a catalog of an author to find out that there will not be another book.

I should probably learn my lesson and look to see if they are alive before I jump in, but I never do. I just go gungho into the unknown. I would be either a terrible explorer or one that sees no obstacle only to be crushed at finding it all ravished by time and the elements.

What are you reading right now? Anything that delights you? I’d love to know.

I have another installment out on YouTube of my painting life. I’m working on a small series in response to the children killed at the school in Iran, am working on a bright floral and show you some work I’ve completed that’s currently hanging in my house.

The Ozarks are beginning to spring to life and I’m finding myself back in my studio more often in between work and domestic life. I’ve graduated, for now, from physical therapy and am on the long road of recovery. Thank you for sharing your time with me.

xo - Jackie