Heather Lende reminds us sometimes the story is right in front of you

I've just finished reading Heather Lende's memoir Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs and it has left me deeply impressed by how difficult it must be to write a book that reads with such ease. I feel like I have spent a year living in Haines, AK with Lende and her family and friends and when the last page was turned I didn't want to let that place go.

This is a 21st century Our Town, folks, and it is splendid. (To date myself, it is all the good you remember of Northern Exposure and even a pile of the quirkiness as well.)

Here is a bit that particularly resonated with me, when Heather explains why she relented and did not object when her husband wanted to hang a Dall sheep head over the mantlepiece. (The plan was to keep "dead-animal trophies to the kitchen".)

You make concessions in a marriage. Everyone does. My husband stayed by my side for three weeks in a nursing home. He paid two thousand dollars in vet bills for a dog that his daughter loves but that drives him crazy. He goes to work everyday and runs a lumberyard in this tiny town well enough to support us. The mortgage is paid off, and he gave me roses on Valentine's Day. He thinks I am pretty even when the March winds howl up the Chilkat River and I get that Walker Evans dust bowl look in my eyes. He still has the same smile he had in college when I fell in love with him. This is all a long way of saying that if he likes the sheep that much then I don't care if he hangs it in the living room.

I don't know about you but that reads as one of the more romantic passages I've come across in ages. The whole book is that way really -- as Lende writes about the accident that nearly killed her (she was medevaced to Seattle and after surgery and hospital spent those three weeks in a nursing home in the rehab that she mentions in the above passage), her children, her friends, the death of her dear mother, she comes around again and again to her husband and her life and all of it is part and parcel of the same thing. She has a good life and she loves the guy she's spending it with. I just don't think it gets much better than that kind of quiet joy.

Copies of Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs will be winging their way to certain dear family members this holiday season. I strongly encourage all of you to read it as well. :)