A Country Year Quotes

“We are past our reproductive years. Men don’t want us; they prefer younger women. It makes good biological sense for males to be attracted to females who are at an earlier point in their breeding years and who still want to build nests, and if that leaves us no longer able to lose ourselves in the pleasures and closeness of pairing, well, we have gained our Selves. We have another valuable thing, too. We have Time, or at least the awareness of it. We have lived long enough and seen enough to understand in a more than intellectual way that we will die, and so we have learned to live as though we are mortal, making our decisions with care and thought because we will not be able to make them again. Time for us will have an end; it is precious, and we have learned its value. Yes, there are many of us, but we are all so different that I am uncomfortable with a sociobiological analysis, and I suspect that, as with Margaret Mead, the solution is a personal and individual one. Because our culture has assigned us no real role, we can make up our own. It is a good time to be a grown-up woman with individuality, strength and crotchets. We are wonderfully free. We live long. Our children are the independent adults we helped them to become, and though they may still want our love they do not need our care. Social rules are so flexible today that nothing we do is shocking. There are no political barriers to us anymore. Provided we stay healthy and can support ourselves, we can do anything, have anything and spend our talents any way that we please.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions

“...when I offered to either stay and help or go bake a pie, it was the pie that was most needed. It took six pies to finish the roof. I had not known that pies were such an important part of construction.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions – A Woman's Memoir of Solitude, Bees, and Healing on an Ozarks Farm

“Got me as fussed as a fart in a mitten.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions

“Today my life has frogs aplenty and this delights me, but I am not so pleased with myself. My life hasn’t turned out as I expected it would, for one thing. For another, I no longer know all about anything. I don’t even know the first thing about frogs, for instance.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions

“Vivimos en un mundo que no sólo es más extraño de lo que pensamos, sino más extraño de lo que podemos pensar."

Sir James Hopwood Jeans”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

“Una casa es demasiado pequeña, demasiado restrictiva. Quiero el mundo entero, y también las estrellas.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

“Vivimo en un mundo que no sólo es más extraño de lo que pensamos, sino más extraño de lo que podemos pensar."

Sir James Hopwood Jeans”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

“(...) Y nosotros aquí, en nuestro mundo, aburridísimo en comparación, pensando que lo sabemos y que lo vemos todo."

Robert Crawford”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

“Vivir en un mundo donde las respuestas a las preguntas pueden ser tantas y tan buenas es lo que me hace salir de la cama y calzarme las botas cada mañana.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

“LO QUE RESIDE AQUÍ ME ES AJENO
BROTAN LÁGRIMAS PORQUE NO LO MEREZCO
Y ME SIENTO AFORTUNADO”

Koan de un poeta japonés anónimo.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

“Lo que reside aquí me es ajeno
Brotan lágrimas porque no lo merezco
Y me siento afortunado.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

“It is satisfying, of course, to build up a supply of winter warmth, free except for the labor. But there is also something heady about becoming a part of the forest process. It sounds straightforward enough to say that when I cut firewood I cull and thin my woods, but that puts me in the business of deciding which trees should be encouraged and which should be taken. I like my great tall black walnut, so I have cut the trees around it to give it the space and light it needs to grow generously. Dogwoods don’t care. They frost the woods with white blossoms in the spring, and grow extravagantly in close company. If I clear a patch, within a year or two pine seedlings move in, grow up exuberantly, compete and thin themselves to tolerable spacing. If I don’t cut a diseased tree, its neighbors may sicken and die. If I cut away one half of a forked white oak, the remaining trunk will grow straight and sturdy. Sap gone, a standing dead tree like the one I cut today will make good firewood, and so invites cutting. But if I leave it, it will make a home for woodpeckers, and later for flying squirrels and screech owls. Where I leave a brush pile of top branches, rabbits make a home. If I leave a fallen tree, others will benefit: ants, spiders, beetles and wood roaches will use it for shelter and food, and lovely delicate fungi will grow out of it before it mixes with leaf mold to become a part of a new layer of soil. One person with a chain saw makes a difference in the woods, and by making a difference becomes part of the woodland cycle, a part of the abstraction that is the forest community.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions – A Woman's Memoir of Solitude, Bees, and Healing on an Ozarks Farm

“Last week I was in St. Louis and went to a party with friends. When some people there learned that I lived in the country, they asked me about brown recluse spiders. Having recently been bitten and read up on the topic, I jumped right in, telling them rather more than they wanted to know about the infrequency and usual mildness of the bites and the shy nature of the little spider. What they wanted to hear more about was the part where the skin rots off. After scaring themselves deliciously for a while, several of them decided to cancel plans for a weekend in the Ozarks, and I realized that one of the major points in the favor of brown recluse spiders is that they help keep down the tourists.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions – A Woman's Memoir of Solitude, Bees, and Healing on an Ozarks Farm

“Sometimes I wonder where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest building has lost its charm.”
― Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions