"Prodigal Summer"

[fiefoe]

Barbara Kingsolver is quite preachy in this novel, but the sermons are done by intelligent women, and the gospel is about respecting nature, so hear hear.
I was NOT happy to realize that Libby lost several hours worth of bookmarks (between hr 2-6.)

• Cocky, she thought. Or cocked, rather. Like a rifle, ready to go off. “What would I need your name for? You fixing to give me a story I’ll want to tell later?” she asked quietly. It was a tactic learned from her father, and the way of mountain people in general—to be quiet when most agitated.
• Now it was only the damp earth that blossomed in fits and throes: trout lilies, spring beauties, all the understory wildflowers that had to hurry through a whole life cycle between May’s first warmth—while sunlight still reached through the bare limbs
• Coyotes: small golden ghosts of the vanished red wolf, returning... “I said I look for them,” she said. The skill of equivocation seemed to be coming to her now. Talking too much, saying not enough.
• So easily her life could have ended right here, without a blink or a witness. She replayed it too often, terrified by the frailty of that link like a weak trailer hitch connecting the front end of her life to all the rest. To this.
• She kept to her own thoughts then, touching them like smooth stones deep in a pocket
• Together they took the trail back into the woods with this new thing between them, their clasped hands, alive with nerve endings like some fresh animal born with its own volition, pulling them forward.
• the miracle that two months of rain and two days of spring heat could perform on a forest floor. It had burst out in mushrooms: yellow, red, brown, pink, deadly white, minuscule, enormous, delicate, and garish, they painted the ground and ran up the sides of trees with their sudden, gilled flesh. Their bulbous heads pushed up through the leaf mold, announcing the eroticism of a fecund woods at the height of spring, the beginning of the world.
• What might bring a Wyoming sheep rancher to the southern Appalachians at this time of year was the Mountain Empire Bounty Hunt, organized for the first time this year. It’d been held recently, she knew, around the first day of May—the time of birthing and nursing, a suitable hunting season for nothing in this world unless the goal was willful extermination.
• It was the county Extension agent who wrote this awful column called “Gardening in Eden,” whose main concern, week after week, was with murdering things.
• All the giant silkworm family, the Ios and lunas she admired, did their eating as caterpillars and as adult moths had no mouths. What mute, romantic extravagance, Lusa thought: a starving creature racing with death to scour the night for his mate.
• an inspiration: fat bouquets of savoy spinach stood ready for picking in her backdoor garden. Sautéed in butter with sliced mushrooms, a bay leaf, and this cream,
• the pheromones of codling moths, notorious pests of apple trees. The laboratory moths lived scrutinized lives in glass boxes where scientists learned to fool the males into mating with scent-baited traps so their virgin brides might vainly cover the world’s apples with empty, harmless eggs.
• Her mother’s language had an expression for people like Cole’s sisters: “Born with ten fingers so they can count to nine.”
• Since she’d become mistress of their family home last June, they’d had little to say to her and everything to say about her.
• “You haven’t gotten a stroke. You’ve gotten a turtle.”
• he admired chestnut wood. He took a moment to honor and praise its color, its grain, and its miraculous capacity to stand up to decades of weather without pressure treatment or insecticides. Why and how, exactly, no one quite knew. There was no other wood to compare with it.
• “That’s going to be your trick,” he said. “Getting them to settle down and kid right, after it gets cold. That’s not the normal season. I’ve never seen it done, to tell you the truth.” <> “Oh. That must be why goat’s so expensive in the middle of winter.”
• “Guy named Walker, Garnett something Walker. There was this whole line of them, all with the same name. Kind of like land barons in this area, a hundred years ago.” <> “And this was the baron’s luxurious abode?”
• “What I’m saying is, they realized the chestnuts were going extinct. So what did they do? They ran up here and cut down every last one that was left alive.”
• You can’t stand how people are.” <> She weighed this, feeling its truth inside herself like damp sand.
• What was it about the West, that cowboy story everybody loved to believe in? Like those men had the goods on tough.
• “I don’t love animals as individuals, I guess that’s the way to put it,” she said. “I love them as whole species. I feel like they should have the right to persist in their own ways.
• But herbivores tend to have shorter lives, and they reproduce faster; they’re just geared toward expendability. They can overpopulate at the drop of a hat if nobody’s eating them.”
• (Lynx:) He grinned, thinking about it. “About three parts pissed off to four parts dignified. They’re gorgeous.
• “And what rule of the world says it’s a sin to kill a predator?” <> “Simple math, Eddie Bondo,... Figure it out, where’s the gold standard here? Who has a bigger influence on other lives?”
• sending the disturbed moth back into its frenetic charge at the glass. On the curtain it had left a double row of tiny eggs, as neat as a double-stitched seam.
• in the same plaintative tone that her single friends in grad school used to complain that all the best men were married, Deanna felt like whining, all the best animals are extinct.
• felt sorry for this heavy-set version of Sammie, so early to ripen and now gone so badly to seed
• (ginseng:) only under sugar maples on a north slope
• She could see how efficiently this pair might work a field edge, pursuing the mice and voles they seemed to prefer. No wonder farmers saw them often and feared for their livestock; if only they knew that they had nothing to lose but their mice. It occurred to her as she watched them that this manner of hunting might actually be helpful to ground-nesting birds like the bobwhite, because of the many passages it would open through the tight clumps of fescue.
• Eddie Bondo had spoken of acorn woodpeckers he’d seen in the West, funny creatures that worked together to drill a dead tree full of little holes, cached thousands of acorns in them, and then spent the rest of their days defending their extravagant treasure from marauding neighbors. How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
• She looked up at him. “Have you ever noticed what goats do in the rain?” <> “Yeah. They get all hunkered up into a horseshoe shape.”
• The moon was high now, and smaller, and she felt her grief shrinking with it. Or not shrinking, never really changing, but ceding some of its dominance over the landscape, exactly like the moon.
• “No, of course not. Who would I tell?” She smiled, shaking her head and wiping her eyes with her palm. “Here’s the really funny thing: your dad was considering making the same pass half an hour ago.”
• She mounted the hill slowly, amazed by the vision of lights opening out ahead of her. Hundreds of luminous fireflies were rising out of the grass while red and blue sparks rained down from the sky.
• Deanna had never known exactly why, but Eddie had told her what a hunter knows about animal perceptions: most birds can’t see in the dark. From one minute to the next, at dusk, they go blind and can’t see at all.
• He wasn’t a mean teacher; he’d just insisted that they get things right. Yet they’d dreaded him for it. They were never his chums, as they were with Con Ricketts in shop, for instance. It made for a long, lonely life, this business of getting things right.
• When you spray a field with a broad-spectrum insecticide like Sevin, you kill the pest bugs and the predator bugs, bang. If the predators and prey are balanced out to start with, and they both get knocked back the same amount, then the pests that survive will increase after the spraying, fast, because most of their enemies have just disappeared. And the predators will decrease because they’ve lost most of their food supply. So in the lag between sprayings, you end up boosting the numbers of the bugs you don’t want and wiping out the ones you need. And every time you spray, it gets worse.”
• In the summer after her husband’s death Lusa discovered lawn-mower therapy. The engine’s vibrations roaring through her body and its thunderous noise in her ears seemed to bully all human language from her head, chasing away the complexities of regret and recrimination. It was a blessing to ride over the grass for an hour or two as a speechless thing, floating through a universe of vibratory sensation. By accident, she had found her way to the mind-set of an insect.
• “The caterpillars eat the poisonous leaves, and their bodies turn toxic. So if a bird eats them, it vomits! It’s kind of a trick the butterfly plays on the birds to keep her caterpillars from getting eaten.”
• “I know.” Lusa looked around at the dim boneyard of obsolete equipment and felt despair, not only—or not specifically—for the loss of her husband, but for all the things people used to grow and make for themselves before they were widowed from their own food chain.
• How could rural kids grow up so ignorant of their world? Their parents gave them Game Boys and TVs that spewed out cityscapes of cops and pretty lawyers, but they couldn’t show them a katydid. It wasn’t neglect, Lusa knew. It was some sad mix of shame and modern intentions, like her own father’s ban on Yiddish.
• she couldn’t remove the softer breast feathers without tearing the flesh, since the bird was already cold. Eddie deferred to her expertise. She was surprised her hands still knew the motions of plucking and squeezing out pinfeathers after so many years of grocery-store birds


• “It’s a prey species. It has fallen prey to us. I can deal with that. Predation’s a sacrament, Eddie; it culls out the sick and the old, keeps populations from going through their own roofs. Predation is honorable.”... “Oh, man, don’t get me started on the subject of childhood brainwash. I hate that. Every fairy story, every Disney movie, every plot with animals in it, the bad guy is always the top carnivore. Wolf, grizzly, anaconda, Tyrannosaurus rex.”
• They would get to smell the heavenly, mounting fragrance and anticipate their feast for hours. Nothing was more wonderful than waiting for a happiness you could be sure of.
• “The gospel according to Deanna. It’s a sin to kill a spider but not a turkey.”
• “When you get a coyote in your rifle sight and you’re fixing to pull the trigger, what happens? Do you forget about everything else in the world until there’s just you and your enemy?” <> He thought about it. “Something like that. Hunting’s like that. You focus.”... “But that’s wrong. There’s no such thing as alone. That animal was going to do something important in its time—eat a lot of things, or be eaten. There’s all these connected things you’re about to blow a hole in. They can’t all be your enemy, because one of those connected things is you.”
• Almost immediately the pot began to hiss with satisfactory little crackles, the age-old conversation of steam and fat.
• an old vision from childhood: a raccoon she found just after the hay mower ran it over. She could still see the matted gray fur, the gleaming jawbone and shock of scattered teeth so much like her own, the dark blood soaking into the ground all on one side, like a shadow of this creature’s final, frightened posture. She could never explain to Eddie how it was, the undercurrent of tragedy that went with farming. And the hallelujahs of it, too: the straight, abundant rows, the corn tassels raised up like children who all knew the answer. The calves born slick and clean into their leggy black-and-white perfection. Life and death always right there in your line of sight. Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed far more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket. Just clearing the land to grow soybeans and corn had killed about everything on half the world.
• “Honey two inches deep on the floor of the whole church, oozing out of the walls, and they’re blaming the poor dead bees.”
• Oh, goodness, what a picture. Garnett could just see the women in their church shoes. “Well,” he contended, “it was the bees that made the honey in the wall.” <> “And it’s the bees that need to vibrate their wings over it night and day to keep it cool in July. Without workers in there to cool the hive, that comb’s going to melt, and all the honey will come pouring out.”
• The Epley maneuver: It’s little hard crystals like rocks that form in the balance-what’s it thingamabob inside your ear... You’ve got you some little rocks in there that float around and make trouble if you tilt your head the wrong way. The trick is to roll them up into a dead-end corner where they can’t get out and bother you.”
• Lusa looked up the mountain. “Some lady lives up there? Are you sure? That’s just supposed to be Forest Service land, above this farm.”
• From what he could see, she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.
• He held up the shingle, showing her the peculiar heart-shaped profile that matched the ones on her roof, and then he threw it at her feet. It lay there in the grass next to a puddle, this thing she needed, like a valentine. A bright crowd of butterflies rose from the puddle in trembling applause. <> “There are two hundred of those in my garage. You can have them all.”
• “Oh, shoot, I stepped right on your marigolds.” <> “That’s okay, I don’t care what they look like. I just put them in to keep nematodes away from the roots of the tomato plants.”
• It dawned on Lusa that this was the Tree of Life her ancestors had woven into their rugs and tapestries, persistently, through all their woes and losses: a bird tree. You might lose a particular tree you owned or loved, but the birds would always keep coming. She could spot their color on every branch: robins, towhees, cardinals, orchard orioles, even sunny little goldfinches. These last Lusa thought were seed eaters, so she didn’t know quite what they were doing in there; enjoying the company, maybe, the same way people will go to a busy city park just to feel a part of something joyful and lively.
• She’d mistaken that feeling for love or lust or perimenopause or an acute invasion of privacy, and as it turned out it was all of those, and none. The explosion had frightened her for the way it loosened her grip on the person she’d always presumed herself to be. But maybe that was what this was going to be: a long, long process of coming undone from one’s self.
• If she’d known how much work there would be in August, she would have considered July a vacation. The garden was like a baby bird in reverse, calling to her relentlessly, opening its maw and giving, giving.
• Lusa swept her pile of sliced carrots into the colander for blanching. Thirty seconds of steam did something to their biochemistry that colored them as orange as daylilies (so why did the canning book call this step blanching?) and kept them perfect in the freezer.
• Lusa was making progress toward understanding. Cole was not to be a husband for whom one cooked, with whom one sat down to meals. He would be a second childhood to carry alongside her own, the child becoming the man for all the years that had led up to their meeting.