Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

It was a good enough life too. After it was over, I realized that it was happier than I had known. We had, you could say, everything but money—Grandmam and I did, anyhow. We had each other and our work, and not much time to think of what we didn’t have.

One evening Virgil called up the Catlett children, pretending to be Santa Claus, and wound them up so that Bess and Wheeler nearly never got them to bed.

maybe i should do this my grandson one day

seeing that the grandchildren, when they came visiting, would live to go home again.

wonder if this was my grandmother's goal when we visited the farm

Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone. Back then I read books that Bess and Auntie loaned to me and books from Mr. Feltner’s mother’s library that was still in her bookcases in the living room. She had been a reader like Bess and Auntie and had bought good books—classics, some of them: Mark Twain’s river books and The Scarlet Letter and several thick novels by Sir Walter Scott and Dickens. I read Old Mortality and thought more than I wanted to of the horrible deeds people have done because they loved God, but it was a good story.

But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

There came a time, long before she could talk, when we knew that she knew her name. There came a time when she began to return our hugs and kisses. There came a time when she began to play, and when Mr. Feltner began to play with her. Mrs. Feltner was a devoted grandmother, but she didn’t play. Mr. Feltner was the one who played. When he was in the house and Little Margaret wasn’t asleep, he would have her on his lap, teaching her to play patty-cake while she laughed and held to his thumbs.

Members of Port William aren’t trying to “get someplace.” They think they are someplace.

People know more about each other than what they tell each other,

Love in this world doesn’t come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

Tractors made farmers dependent on the big companies as they never had been before.

If we were hard at it in the hog killing, he would shout, “Thirty years in a slaughter house and never cut a gut!”

Burley Coulter

“Yes, Ivy, I know you,” I said, and I sounded kind. I didn’t understand exactly what had happened until the thought of her woke me up in the middle of that night, and I was saying to myself, “You have forgiven her.” I had. My old hatred and contempt and fear, that I had kept so carefully so long, were gone, and I was free.

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else.

The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don’t have a child anymore, and that is sad.

You send your children to college, you do the best you can for them, and then, because you have to be, you’re careful not to make plans for them. You don’t want to be disappointed, and you don’t want to burden them with your expectations either. But you keep a little thought, a little hope, that maybe they’ll go away and study and learn and then come back, and you’ll have them for neighbors.

You’ll have your grandchildren nearby where you can get to know them and help to raise them.

it is nice having our grandson only 30 minutes away

I ask about their lives, but they have little confidence that I can understand their lives, and they don’t tell me much.

Hannah talking to teens which reminds me of my Aunt who learned to text so that she could keep in touch with her grandkids

I don’t think there is an argument for being a farmer. There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to.

Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, “hopeth all things.” But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

There comes a time in the life of a farm when it needs young people coming on full of strength and hope with the future shining before them. It begins to need work faster than the old people can supply it.

Nathan was sick, and he knew it, he knew it better than I thought he did, a long time before he consented to go to the doctor. He was wearing out, he said, but he wasn’t only wearing out, he was sick. He lost weight and strength. He got bony and hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. You could see his skull behind his face. He felt bad. He was often almost too ill to get out of bed. But he kept on in his old way, quiet, more pleasant even than usual, staying busy off someplace, mostly by himself.

You can’t give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering.

Danny happened to stop by the house early that morning to call for Reuben or one of Reuben’s boys to come and help him with a calving heifer.

Reminds me of the time that my Uncle stopped back at the house before going out and I had to go help with this