Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

Willa stroked his crazy hair. He had more than an infant’s normal share, jet black like Helene’s, standing up from his head as if in horror at this life he’d landed in.

“Why memorize a stupid factoid like that when you can look it up on your phone? Oh, excuse me I forgot, you don’t own one.” “Holding and synthesizing information in your brain creates your personality. You’re surrendering your personality to an electronic device in your pocket.” “Yep. Just one more of those boring drones that finishes his education.”

Thatcher physically resisted the urge to walk over and read the books’ titles, a magnetism that had controlled him since the day in late childhood when he’d first set eyes on a book. Instead he put himself down on the settee facing Mrs. Treat at her desk. Half a dozen large glass candy jars, unconventionally provisioned, crowded the side table near his elbow. He leaned over for a closer look. Each jar was half filled with soil and planted with a miniature garden of mosses, wildflowers, and ferns. The breath of these small green worlds moistened the inner curve of the jars’ glass shoulders. More of the jars occupied a curiosity table near the bay window and another sat on the desk along with

Now Mrs. Treat grinned like a child who has inveigled an adult into a favorite game.

“Yes. And like every animal, our losses and gains have shaped our bodies and made us the creatures we are. I believe it completely.”

So much of life with infirmity came down to dignity and will.

She heard the castigation in my family and felt some remorse, but this man didn’t belong to her.

A short laugh escaped Thatcher, pulling all the blue eyes his way. “I’m sorry. You’ve made him sound like a sensation novel.” “The case of the missing hand!” Polly cried. “I’m sure I don’t understand what you mean,” said Aurelia. “He means detective stories!” Polly clarified, unfortunately. “Don’t worry, Mother. Polly is not reading Wilkie Collins or Edgar Poe,” Rose promised, widening her eyes at Thatcher.

We are often persuaded that what is convenient is also right. But these associates were not architects. Their idea was unsound.”

Thatcher’s annoyance rarely left his mind, even at home. He pursued arguments with Cutler inside his head so often that Rose caught him in the parlor speaking aloud and asked him earnestly if he’d seen a ghost.

“And Bob’s your uncle.”

“Swamp pinks. It only grows here in the cedars, and only in a very few spots. You can see it’s rhizomatous. It spreads underground. This group extends two or three acres and then disappears. You will walk fifteen miles before you find the next clump.”

“He lost his instincts for stirring an audience,” Mary said simply. “My pa says the doctor is full of his own beans.”

"im full of beans"

Of all lifetimes ever lived, in this case. Every person in history must have placed himself at the head of a Creator’s table. To see that table overturned, cutlery and china dashed to the floor, one’s very place lost, was to witness the sky falling. Thatcher hadn’t fully considered Darwin in such threatening light.

“I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” “If that is our nature, then nature is madness.

So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.

Willa resisted pointing out it wasn’t like a baby, it was the actual article.

“What are you saying, Willa? I’m a happy loser?” “No! Not a loser. But maybe I’m looking for a little more fire in the belly, on your own behalf? You deserve more.” “Deserving, getting, and wanting are three different things, moro. Typically unrelated.”

“What? You think I’m unusual? That’s human nature. In terms of the available options, it’s inevitable to want all the goods. Isn’t it?” This question he considered at length. “Not inevitable,” he said finally. “If that were true, people would never marry. But we do. We choose to be monogamous. Maybe wanting less than everything translates to quality over quantity.”

soporific.

We have to make our dwellings soporific by nightfall. Casey tends to be parsimonious but has a huge savings account.

cajole

Cajole z to attend family events

lugubrious

Sad

Oh, blast. In these trifles of etiquette Thatcher was a dunderhead.

“None yet. I am a beginner at marriage. Sharing my home with a mother-in-law who still seems to hope her daughter might marry better than she did. And a little scoundrel of a sister-in-law who thinks her sister stole the prize. If I were Jacob, I think I should labor the extra seven years and marry her as well.” “Quite a confession, from a man whose life’s work is avoiding enemies. Leah and Rachel were always at one another’s necks, as I recollect.” Carruth smiled. “Ah. But they never blamed Jacob, did they? Bartered mandrakes for the right to sleep with him.”

prurient.

Encouraging excessive sexual interest

obsequious

Excessively obedient

Nausea rose in Thatcher’s craw.

mollycoddling

Indulging

He argued that a complex explanation, when it does not hold water, will always grow more complex as it attempts to patch its own holes.

My cousin vinny

repudiated.

Refused to be accepted , or , proved invalid

“The universe is a stair,” Cutler intoned as if some holy valve had opened in his larynx, “rising in degrees from the rocks through lower life-forms up to man, and then the angels.”

But in early March the patient rallied back to consciousness for a last hurrah. They’d been warned to expect this, the evolutionary gift of one final surge of adrenaline to a beleaguered body to fuel an escape from danger.

censorious

Severely critical of others

She didn’t look at Willa but out at the graves. “People can change their minds about little things, but on the big ones they’d rather die first. A used-up planet scares the piss out of them, after they spent their whole lives thinking the cupboard would never go bare. No offense, Mom, but you’re kind of not that different from Papu. You want a nice house that’s all your own, you want your kids to have more than you did.” “I’m human, Tig. We live, we consume. I think that’s just how we have to be.” “Of course you think that. When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can’t even see what you’re believing in.” “Most of us

“Poor Mama,” she said, leaning her springy head against Willa’s shoulder. “I know. It feels like the end of the world when you can’t have the things you always wanted. But it’s not the end of the world. There’s some other place to go.”

Hope shes right

rancor,

Bitterness

“Well, I can tell you this. My household allowance of scandal is used up. I am now invisible.” Thatcher thought Mary was not invisible, but as free as any woman could be.

Dr. Gray has written me about collecting an aquatic iris reported to grow in the Saint Johns that he thinks may be unclassified.