The cover was what first attracted me to Cherries in Winter by Suzan Colon. For some reason, I immediately thought of my mother and her signature lipstick, Cherries in the Snow. Turns out, the author's grandmother and my mother (who were of an age) had something in common as they both advised, "Never go without lipstick; it only makes you look washed out."
From Cover Flap
When Suzan Colon was laid off from her dream job at a magazine during the economic downturn of 2008, she needed to cut her budget way, way back--and that meant home cooking. Her mother suggested, "Why don't you look in Nana's recipe folder?" In the basement, Suzan found the tattered treasure, full of handwritten and meticulously typed recipes, peppered with her grandmother Matilda's commentary in the margins. Reading it, Suzan realized she had found something more than a collection of recipes--she had found the key to her family's survival through hard times.
Notes and Quotes
First reactions:
Put up soup; that's what my family says when times get tough. Some people batten down the hatches, others go to the mattresses--whatever your family's code phrase is, it means bracing yourself and doing whatever will sustain you through rough going until things get better. In my family, we put up soup.
When your known world is shaken:
Being in this recession feels like watching a nature film about the disintegration of a major polar ice shelf: Huge chunks of everything we thought was solid keep breaking apart and disappearing into an abyss, the depth of which no one knows. Fear is palpable, and worry about how much worse it's going to get is the main topic of conversation.
On Nana's love of words and writing:
Nana was in love with words. In school she read the dictionary, a page a day, and she bought new, updated dictionaries the way some people buy novels. In the box with the recipe file I find envelopes and folders full of papers--some related to her work as a secretary for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and the Coliseum, a convention center in New York. But most of it is her personal writing. She didn't keep a diary but wrote about her life in a series of essays and articles she hoped to send to magazines, and her Everywoman subject matter was ahead of its time.
The cherries:
One night in the middle of December, the fruit vendor had the winter cherries. They were pricey all right, but Matilda didn't hesitate. It wasn't that cold out, so mother and daughter walked to the park and sat on a bench to enjoy their extravagance. "Is there anything better in the world," Matilda said, "than being in Manhattan in Central Park and eating cherries in winter?"
The rationalization for the cherries:
The women in my family have certain traits: height, prominent noses, and the ability to rationalize spending extra, just once in a while, when there is no extra to be spent. Because. I got some of their height and all of the nose, but I thought that last characteristic was missing in me. It wasn't; I just didn't realize that it only wakes up when we begin to measure ourselves by money, or the lack of it. It's not a reflexive kick of denial about having less. It's a deep breath reminding us not to become miserly in spirit. We may be broke, but we're not poor.
You're unemployed, you need a trip to the hairdresser (you no longer go to a "hair stylist"), you need to make decisions:
Of course, there's no decision to be made. I'd give up my hair appointments forever and become the Wild Woman of Borneo before I'd let my cat be in pain or even have to forgo the cruncy kibble she likes so much. Nor will I repurpose my monthly donations to the ASPCA and the local food bank for this expense. I've have to cut down on the amount I give, but I refuse to cut charitable donations out completely. There have been too many stories of pets left behid in abandoned homes and last year's food bank donors becoming this year's recipients. Not giving while I still have something to give, no matter how little, is an inner beauty routine I won't do without.
I've never in my life had a $300 hair cut or shopped in stores as exclusive as those Ms. Colon frequented, so my adjustment to unemployment has been on a lesser scale. However, the reality of unemployment is a blow to ego and psyche; and the adjustment, whether large- or small-scale, is daunting and a bit scary. Many of the thoughts and fears expressed by Ms. Colon rang true. I didn't put up soup, but there was a pot of beef stew to lend comfort on that first day of imposed leisure.
And--as my daughter reminded me--when you're feeling bad, there isn't a better picker-upper than a new tube of lipstick. Do you think Revlon still sells Cherries in the Snow?
Rating: 3.5/5 (Non-fiction scale)
Dedication: For Mom, Dad, and Nathan
Reeve Lindbergh, daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, used the occasion of her sixtieth birthday to publish a new collection of essays entitled, Forward from Here: Leaving Middle Age—and Other Unexpected Adventures. (I often wonder at the necessity of the “coloned” book title. Would we not understand the title without this seemingly parenthetic explanation?) The Hippie lifestyle in Vermont as described in the first essay, "Hippies in the Hot Tub," didn’t exactly mirror my 1970s experiences; however, Lindbergh’s thoughtful passages regarding the who’s and the what’s of passing life experiences grabbed me and didn’t let go until the last page.
From Publishers WeeklyIn this collection of poignant essays, Lindbergh struggles to extract meaning, and even solace, from an imperfect everyday reality. Heading her list of concerns is her looming 60th birthday and the change and decline that it symbolizes-the departure from home of her children, a benign brain tumor, the therapeutic drug culture that is the hallmark of old age in America. Despite her anxieties and losses, she manages to find in fragile, flawed things-a broken sea shell, a heron that's lost a leg-a kind of beauty. Lindbergh also explores her fraught relationship with her father, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, "an angry, restless, opinionated perfectionist" whose "very presence alternately crowded and startled everyone," and grapples with the discovery that he had secretly fathered seven children-her half siblings-in Europe. Set mostly amid the tranquil surroundings of her Vermont farmstead, Reeve's essays are suffused with a sly, gentle humor that supports her quiet resolve to carry on.
Passages
On relationships:
There is something wonderful about unexpected affection, whether it develops between an octogenarian and an eight-year-old, a staunch conservative Republican and a progressive liberal Democrat, or a Yankee farmer and a hippie homesteader. It delights me that every so often the good feeling that two people have for each other is too strong for their biases and their upbringing, and defeats both in a flood of fellow feeling neither can explain.
On aging:
Fortunately, fears fed by the imagination tend to lose energy and diminish over time. Now I’m close to sixty, and though I don’t always recognize the face I see in the mirror, something has changed in the way I think about aging and dying. I have an increased awareness of my own aging. The process increasingly interests and amazes me, annoys and irritates me, and sometimes it still frightens me, too, but much, much less than it used to. I find that along with the annoyance and irritation there is amusement—how often and in how many places can I lose my glasses in a day?—and that in the place of the old fear for my own physical survival there is an ongoing very real sadness at the absence of the friends and family members who have died before me.
On love and loss:
As I journey on, I carry my lost loved ones with me: my sister, my mother, and all the others. I have learned over the years that I can do this, that love continues beyond loss. It continues not abstractly but intimately, and it continues forever. My experience has also made me understand that loss is inevitable, and that loss, too, continues forever, right along with love.
On “ongoingness”:
There have been one or two horrible times in my life, as there are in too many lives, when the “ongoingness” my mother taught me to value was interrupted in a radical way and neither daily rhythms nor the discipline of writing could restore my balance. An event can be so cataclysmic that it pulls its surviving victims right out of life to plummet into a deep and terrible darkness where there is no solid ground and where day-to-day comforts are meaningless. I have learned by living through a few such times, however, that daily life has a strength and a staying power even more persistent than the terrible downward forces of catastrophe. Dailiness outlasts despair. For a while the rhythms of daily life may seem to be submerged, even drowned in disaster, but that is never true. Sooner or later, after mornings and evenings and mornings and evenings and mornings and evenings again, however many of them it takes, and never by dishonoring reality or by displacing grief, never by rushing the inevitability of feeling, meaning always returns.
On sustenance as we age:
I’m convinced that what we really need most to sustain us as we grow older, more than any drug on the market, is this kind of appreciative awareness, along with compassion, a sense of humor, and simple common sense. Side effects will include a certain amount of pain, a fair share of sorrow, recurring doses of discomfort great and small, and an immeasurable, priceless quantity of peace of mind.
There are many more passages that I have marked, but I will leave it to your reading of Forward from Here to find the words that sing out to you.
~*~
After hearing Ms. Lindbergh speak at Porter Square Books on May 7, I am looking forward to reading Under a Wing and No More Words. And I am eagerly hunting down her children’s books written in rhyme!
Forward from Here would be a thoughtful reading for everyone, not just those of us approaching or in our 60s. Any reader could find direction in learning to embrace the everyday, to appreciate the details of life from the hissing of a teakettle to the crunch of stone underfoot on a daily walk, or to make friends with that most important person in life--yourself.
5/5 (Non-fiction scale)
Simon & Schuster (2008)
Hardcover
220 pages
Finished: May 2008
Dedication: To Nat
