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Port William
Hannah Coulter
Hannah Coulter is Wendell Berry's seventh novel and his first to employ the voice of a woman character in its telling. Hannah, the now-elderly narrator, recounts the love she has for the land and for her community. She remembers each of her two husbands, and all places and community connections threatened by twentieth-century technologies.
190 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
Wendell Berry
324 books4,161 followersWendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,848 reviews
October 6, 2020
“This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.”
There aren’t too many writers out there that can offer such a sense of peace to my entire being while reading. Wendell Berry’s words are like that soothing cold cloth that was laid upon your forehead by a loved one when you were a young child. That dish of ice cream to ease a sore throat. The little comforts of a bedroom and the caretaker’s gentle hands are what stay with you even more than the sickness and fever that overwhelmed you at the time. That’s how I felt while reading this beautiful novel. My anxieties were laid to rest. With a bit of luck, what I recall later will not be the worries that have surrounded us but the feelings of togetherness with even just a few people that have made it all worthwhile.
“If you were bred to the plains or the seashore or the mountains, maybe you wouldn’t enjoy it here. But if the Port William neighborhood looks at all like home to you, then you may think this a pleasant place, or even moving and beautiful. It surely is a place like no other.”
I’ve been to Port William while holding Wendell Berry’s tender hand several times now. It does indeed feel like home to me. It’s a small town that exists like a real place and these characters more ‘real’ than some people I see about me each day. If I could pack my bags and go, I’d head there right now. Port William is likened to a “membership”, a community that welcomes you into it should you be inclined to get to know it and become a true part of it. It’s not for those that like to live in the fast lane. It’s not for those that steer away from the intimacies of real friendships and love. It is a place where you can go to heal and make a life among those that revere simpler times and basic human needs. It is not a place where only good things happen – no such fantasies exist. There will be grief and sorrow to overcome. Life comes and passes as it does anywhere else. But I believe one can truly feel alive here. You finally comprehend what it means to live and love.
“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.”
This is Hannah Coulter’s story. If you’ve not read Berry’s writing before, then I will tell you that you don’t need to read his books in any particular order. Each will highlight a different member of the community, but will also pull in others that you will come to recognize as old friends. This is a story of Hannah’s life, first deprived of a mother as hers died while she was just twelve years old. Hannah’s grandmother then becomes a mother to her, offering her the love that a stepmother refused to share. And what a lifesaver this grandmother proved to be – she’s a truly wonderful human being! I knew right from the start this one was going to break my heart, not from sadness but from the beauty of love freely and selflessly given.
“And Grandmam, as I have seen in looking back, was the decider of my fate. She shaped my life, without of course knowing what my life would be… I was a piece of soft clay. I couldn’t be that way for long, but while I was she was determined to mold me into something that could stay alive.”
This is also the story of Hannah’s two marriages and her life as a mother and grandmother. I found myself nodding, weeping, and pausing many times throughout in order to just sit and think. Children grow up and move away, losing interest in taking over the responsibilities of a farming life. Life has its share of burdens and one learns to get through them as best he or she can with the support of those that care deeply for one another. What I take away the most from Berry’s novels is the theme of love – how if you open up your heart, there always seems to be room for more. It may come and go, there are heartaches and loss, but it’s always there waiting for us as a gift to both give and receive if only we allow it. If you are in need of a respite for your soul (and who isn’t these days?!), please don’t put off reading Wendell Berry any longer.
“Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. Though it contains all the world, the sun, moon, and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts. It is in the hearts of those who choose to come in. Some do not come in. Some may stay out forever. Some come in together and leave separately. Some come in and stay, until they die, and after.”
“Time doesn’t stop. Your life doesn’t stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.”
There aren’t too many writers out there that can offer such a sense of peace to my entire being while reading. Wendell Berry’s words are like that soothing cold cloth that was laid upon your forehead by a loved one when you were a young child. That dish of ice cream to ease a sore throat. The little comforts of a bedroom and the caretaker’s gentle hands are what stay with you even more than the sickness and fever that overwhelmed you at the time. That’s how I felt while reading this beautiful novel. My anxieties were laid to rest. With a bit of luck, what I recall later will not be the worries that have surrounded us but the feelings of togetherness with even just a few people that have made it all worthwhile.
“If you were bred to the plains or the seashore or the mountains, maybe you wouldn’t enjoy it here. But if the Port William neighborhood looks at all like home to you, then you may think this a pleasant place, or even moving and beautiful. It surely is a place like no other.”
I’ve been to Port William while holding Wendell Berry’s tender hand several times now. It does indeed feel like home to me. It’s a small town that exists like a real place and these characters more ‘real’ than some people I see about me each day. If I could pack my bags and go, I’d head there right now. Port William is likened to a “membership”, a community that welcomes you into it should you be inclined to get to know it and become a true part of it. It’s not for those that like to live in the fast lane. It’s not for those that steer away from the intimacies of real friendships and love. It is a place where you can go to heal and make a life among those that revere simpler times and basic human needs. It is not a place where only good things happen – no such fantasies exist. There will be grief and sorrow to overcome. Life comes and passes as it does anywhere else. But I believe one can truly feel alive here. You finally comprehend what it means to live and love.
“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.”
This is Hannah Coulter’s story. If you’ve not read Berry’s writing before, then I will tell you that you don’t need to read his books in any particular order. Each will highlight a different member of the community, but will also pull in others that you will come to recognize as old friends. This is a story of Hannah’s life, first deprived of a mother as hers died while she was just twelve years old. Hannah’s grandmother then becomes a mother to her, offering her the love that a stepmother refused to share. And what a lifesaver this grandmother proved to be – she’s a truly wonderful human being! I knew right from the start this one was going to break my heart, not from sadness but from the beauty of love freely and selflessly given.
“And Grandmam, as I have seen in looking back, was the decider of my fate. She shaped my life, without of course knowing what my life would be… I was a piece of soft clay. I couldn’t be that way for long, but while I was she was determined to mold me into something that could stay alive.”
This is also the story of Hannah’s two marriages and her life as a mother and grandmother. I found myself nodding, weeping, and pausing many times throughout in order to just sit and think. Children grow up and move away, losing interest in taking over the responsibilities of a farming life. Life has its share of burdens and one learns to get through them as best he or she can with the support of those that care deeply for one another. What I take away the most from Berry’s novels is the theme of love – how if you open up your heart, there always seems to be room for more. It may come and go, there are heartaches and loss, but it’s always there waiting for us as a gift to both give and receive if only we allow it. If you are in need of a respite for your soul (and who isn’t these days?!), please don’t put off reading Wendell Berry any longer.
“Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. Though it contains all the world, the sun, moon, and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts. It is in the hearts of those who choose to come in. Some do not come in. Some may stay out forever. Some come in together and leave separately. Some come in and stay, until they die, and after.”
“Time doesn’t stop. Your life doesn’t stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.”
March 21, 2022
4+stars
I love the quiet introspection of Berry’s of writing. This novel reads like a memoir of a real person telling of a life well lived in a well loved place. Hannah is a stunning character, one to admire and remember. I felt as if I knew everything about her, as if she was a good friend telling it all to me alone. I shed some tears with her, feeling her loss, as she grieves the death of her husband. “It is hard for me to think or speak of the time that came then. I remember it as dark. I can’t remember the sun shining, though I’m sure it must have shone part of the time. I would think sometimes with a black sickness of fear and hopelessness and guilt, “What am I doing alive ?” I also felt her joy of loving.
I’m not sure I’ve read any book with such a deep sense of place as Berry gives us in Port William, Kentucky. “Our story is the story of our place…” A place where the people are the “membership”, as if they were part of a private club. But, the “membership” is much more. It’s based on a connection to each other through friendship, love, a commitment to each other and to the land. I have to admit there were times when I felt these characters were just too good to be real, but it was their goodness that lifted me.
Thanks to my fabulous friends, Cathrine, Carmel, Diane and Kathleen for sharing the experience with them.
I love the quiet introspection of Berry’s of writing. This novel reads like a memoir of a real person telling of a life well lived in a well loved place. Hannah is a stunning character, one to admire and remember. I felt as if I knew everything about her, as if she was a good friend telling it all to me alone. I shed some tears with her, feeling her loss, as she grieves the death of her husband. “It is hard for me to think or speak of the time that came then. I remember it as dark. I can’t remember the sun shining, though I’m sure it must have shone part of the time. I would think sometimes with a black sickness of fear and hopelessness and guilt, “What am I doing alive ?” I also felt her joy of loving.
I’m not sure I’ve read any book with such a deep sense of place as Berry gives us in Port William, Kentucky. “Our story is the story of our place…” A place where the people are the “membership”, as if they were part of a private club. But, the “membership” is much more. It’s based on a connection to each other through friendship, love, a commitment to each other and to the land. I have to admit there were times when I felt these characters were just too good to be real, but it was their goodness that lifted me.
Thanks to my fabulous friends, Cathrine, Carmel, Diane and Kathleen for sharing the experience with them.
May 19, 2017
Wendell Berry, perhaps more than any other author, understands the connection people have with place. Not only this, but he has captured the wisdom and grace that age provides to those willing to understand and to learn. This book is profound and prophetic in so many ways--it weaves an emotional web of beauty, happiness, life, faith, and hope. Yet Berry is not a naive optimist. He understands the pain of life and captures it as well as any of the other range of human emotions.
Hannah Coulter tells her story as an old woman--with the wisdom, grace, charity, and love of a mature Christian woman. She recounts her early years in Shagbark, how her mother died while she was still a young girl and the attachment she developed with her grandmother. She moves to Hargrave shortly after graduating from high school. She begins her connection with the people of Port William here. I won't spoil any more of the story, but she becomes an integral member of the community and witnesses the decline of the family farm--indeed is a part of it.
Her story is as authentic, as true, as any real person you'll meet. Berry exhibits a skill for understanding people, place, authority, youth, old age, and just about anything he puts into words. The novel is simply beautiful--reverent as one other GoodReads reviewer wrote. Berry recognizes the sanctity of life--of people--all people. Each person is their own in this novel and he gives them the dignity they deserve as people made in the image of God.
Hannah Coulter makes you want to be a better person--a better parent, a better spouse, a better image-bearer. Be gracious, be charitable. Love people, love your place, love your life, be content with where and what you are. This novel is out of step with modernity--Berry in fact rejects modernity and its impersonal disconnection from family, place, and neighbor. You'll yearn for what has been lost, and hope for what might be restored.
Hannah Coulter tells her story as an old woman--with the wisdom, grace, charity, and love of a mature Christian woman. She recounts her early years in Shagbark, how her mother died while she was still a young girl and the attachment she developed with her grandmother. She moves to Hargrave shortly after graduating from high school. She begins her connection with the people of Port William here. I won't spoil any more of the story, but she becomes an integral member of the community and witnesses the decline of the family farm--indeed is a part of it.
Her story is as authentic, as true, as any real person you'll meet. Berry exhibits a skill for understanding people, place, authority, youth, old age, and just about anything he puts into words. The novel is simply beautiful--reverent as one other GoodReads reviewer wrote. Berry recognizes the sanctity of life--of people--all people. Each person is their own in this novel and he gives them the dignity they deserve as people made in the image of God.
Hannah Coulter makes you want to be a better person--a better parent, a better spouse, a better image-bearer. Be gracious, be charitable. Love people, love your place, love your life, be content with where and what you are. This novel is out of step with modernity--Berry in fact rejects modernity and its impersonal disconnection from family, place, and neighbor. You'll yearn for what has been lost, and hope for what might be restored.
June 19, 2019
I am making a gift to myself, a promise to read all of Wendell Berry’s novels. Hannah Coulter is my latest stop on that journey though Port William, and, as always, I am sitting after closing the book with misty eyes and a full heart.
How can one be so wise and yet so human? I felt inclined to mark every other passage, but in the end, I didn’t want to step outside the story even long enough to drag the yellow marker across the page. As is so often the case with Berry, this is not a plot driven story, so much as a tribute to life and the life of Hannah particularly. It is a tribute to the resilience of the human soul and the beauty of existence itself.
Hannah profoundly understands love--that it has a scent, an electric touch, a shape, and that it comes in as many varieties as there are people.
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.
She understands the nature of resentment and forgiveness:
But I knew at the same instant that my resentment was gone, just gone. And the fear of her that was once so big in me, where was it? And who was this poor suffer who stood there with me? ‘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 the 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.
And, she understands loss:
I was changed by Nathan’s death, because I had to be. Our life together here was over. It was life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember.
Throughout the novel, she gives good advice to anyone who might be listening, but perhaps the most valuable advice is this:
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 everything give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
I know why I keep wishing to return to Port William. It is the same impulse that makes you want to go visit an old friend and rock on the porch and share some memories and laughs that only the two of you can ever share. It is the reason you take out the picture books and stare at the faces of the past, the ones that are gone forever, and think, “but they aren’t gone, they are alive in me, they cannot wholly die until I die as well.”
Some authors give you characters, Wendell Berry gives you friends.
How can one be so wise and yet so human? I felt inclined to mark every other passage, but in the end, I didn’t want to step outside the story even long enough to drag the yellow marker across the page. As is so often the case with Berry, this is not a plot driven story, so much as a tribute to life and the life of Hannah particularly. It is a tribute to the resilience of the human soul and the beauty of existence itself.
Hannah profoundly understands love--that it has a scent, an electric touch, a shape, and that it comes in as many varieties as there are people.
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.
She understands the nature of resentment and forgiveness:
But I knew at the same instant that my resentment was gone, just gone. And the fear of her that was once so big in me, where was it? And who was this poor suffer who stood there with me? ‘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 the 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.
And, she understands loss:
I was changed by Nathan’s death, because I had to be. Our life together here was over. It was life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember.
Throughout the novel, she gives good advice to anyone who might be listening, but perhaps the most valuable advice is this:
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 everything give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
I know why I keep wishing to return to Port William. It is the same impulse that makes you want to go visit an old friend and rock on the porch and share some memories and laughs that only the two of you can ever share. It is the reason you take out the picture books and stare at the faces of the past, the ones that are gone forever, and think, “but they aren’t gone, they are alive in me, they cannot wholly die until I die as well.”
Some authors give you characters, Wendell Berry gives you friends.
April 19, 2020
The best thing about returning to Port William was to reunite with Berry’s gentleness. This time, the voice of Hannah Coulter, steady, measured but full of reposed emotion, took me back to a place where neighbors were family, where life couldn’t be understood without compassion and gratitude.
It’s always humbling to meet a character that speaks of life without regrets and of people with unselfish love in spite of the unfairness that often befell upon her. I will certainly remember Hannah’s meditations on being a devoted spouse, caring mother and relentless worker, and her wise conclusions about old age and what to expect from others based on what you have given to them.
Reading Berry’s composed, gentle prose was a great comfort in this time of upheaval and confusion. A reminder that people are beautiful, that every day spent with those we love is a gift and that today, even confined at home, might be the peak of happiness in my life. So thanks for the reminder, Mr. Berry.
It’s always humbling to meet a character that speaks of life without regrets and of people with unselfish love in spite of the unfairness that often befell upon her. I will certainly remember Hannah’s meditations on being a devoted spouse, caring mother and relentless worker, and her wise conclusions about old age and what to expect from others based on what you have given to them.
Reading Berry’s composed, gentle prose was a great comfort in this time of upheaval and confusion. A reminder that people are beautiful, that every day spent with those we love is a gift and that today, even confined at home, might be the peak of happiness in my life. So thanks for the reminder, Mr. Berry.
August 2, 2020
I had to sit for awhile and collect myself after finishing this one. Nathan's funeral hit me hard, Hannah's worry over her children's lives in the modern world were familiar, the loss of the old ways because of progress that can't be stopped or ignored, but that destroys so much that is good in human relationships; reading about these things in the midst of this year of 2020, when change is occurring exponentially day after day, has left me emotionally drained. In a good way, because, after all, it is Port William.
This was my second read of this novel. The first was many years ago and was my first Wendell Berry book, and made me a lasting fan. It was a great introduction to the people of Port William. This time around, these people had become my friends, I knew more about them and the things they had been through. I could laugh at Burley Coulter's antics, recognize Jayber Crow, sympathize with the Feltners, and watch Andy Catlett grow up. Port William is my "happy place". I am so grateful to Mr. Berry for creating this little pocket of civilization.
This was my second read of this novel. The first was many years ago and was my first Wendell Berry book, and made me a lasting fan. It was a great introduction to the people of Port William. This time around, these people had become my friends, I knew more about them and the things they had been through. I could laugh at Burley Coulter's antics, recognize Jayber Crow, sympathize with the Feltners, and watch Andy Catlett grow up. Port William is my "happy place". I am so grateful to Mr. Berry for creating this little pocket of civilization.
September 22, 2020
My introduction to Wendell Berry was his novel “A World Lost.” Truth be told I was not impressed, and I remember several GR friends offered suggestions on other books by him to read. I very much liked this novel. The writing/prose was par excellence.
The story line was excellent. It wasn’t sappy. Hannah tells the story and her remembrances held my attention throughout. I very much liked Hannah and her first husband Virgil and her second husband Nathan. And all sorts of people around them…Hannah’s Grandmam, Virgil’s mother and father who took in Hannah as if she were their daughter, Burley Coulter who was Nathans’ uncle and so on…And I want to read more about Port William. 😊
There was one chapter that took place outside of Port William and it was Okinawa at the time of WWII. Berry is unflinching in his writing of what soldiers had to go through—Nathan fought over there and never wanted to discuss what he had been through with Hannah. Yet that surely affected him, and she later on in her life did some research to learn what he might have gone through. Hell on earth.
I took two pages of notes, and I made comments at three places regarding the beautiful writing…or the wisdom that seeped through the pages into my brain. Here are the passages that struck me, but I must emphasize they are only just samples of the rich writing in this book…
• From Hannah: What you won’t see, but what I see always, is the pattern of our life here that made and kept it as you see it now, all the licks and steps and rounds of work, all the comings and goings, all the days and years. A lifetime’s knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of person who knows it, walking over it, and it is never fully handed on to anybody else, but has been mainly lost, generation after generation, going back and forth back to the first Indians. And now the history of Nathan’s and my life here is fading away. When I am gone, it too will be mostly gone.
• From Hannah when she makes a remark about her children: “…I said, “I just wanted them to have a better chance than I had.” Nathan said, “Don’t complain about the chance you had,” in the same exact way he used to tell the boys, “Don’t cuss the weather.” Sometimes you can say dreadful things without knowing it. Nathan understood this better than I did. Like several of his one-sentence conversations, this one stuck in my mind and finally changed it. The change came too late, maybe, but it turned my mind inside out like a sock. … Was I sorry that I had known my parents and Grandmam and Ora Finley and the Catletts and the Feltners, and that I had married Virgil and come to live in Port William, and that I had lived on after Virgil’s death to marry Nathan and come to our place to raise our family and live among the Coulters and the rest of our family? Well, that was the chance I had. …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.
• Jim: This is Hannah reflecting on her life and it is only part of a longer passage that is beautiful: “But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.”
Reviews:
https://preachthestory.com/hannah-cou...
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2016/w...
https://vincereview.blogspot.com/2020...
My edition is from a publishing house that I have not heard of, Shoemaker & Hoard (2004).
The story line was excellent. It wasn’t sappy. Hannah tells the story and her remembrances held my attention throughout. I very much liked Hannah and her first husband Virgil and her second husband Nathan. And all sorts of people around them…Hannah’s Grandmam, Virgil’s mother and father who took in Hannah as if she were their daughter, Burley Coulter who was Nathans’ uncle and so on…And I want to read more about Port William. 😊
There was one chapter that took place outside of Port William and it was Okinawa at the time of WWII. Berry is unflinching in his writing of what soldiers had to go through—Nathan fought over there and never wanted to discuss what he had been through with Hannah. Yet that surely affected him, and she later on in her life did some research to learn what he might have gone through. Hell on earth.
I took two pages of notes, and I made comments at three places regarding the beautiful writing…or the wisdom that seeped through the pages into my brain. Here are the passages that struck me, but I must emphasize they are only just samples of the rich writing in this book…
• From Hannah: What you won’t see, but what I see always, is the pattern of our life here that made and kept it as you see it now, all the licks and steps and rounds of work, all the comings and goings, all the days and years. A lifetime’s knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of person who knows it, walking over it, and it is never fully handed on to anybody else, but has been mainly lost, generation after generation, going back and forth back to the first Indians. And now the history of Nathan’s and my life here is fading away. When I am gone, it too will be mostly gone.
• From Hannah when she makes a remark about her children: “…I said, “I just wanted them to have a better chance than I had.” Nathan said, “Don’t complain about the chance you had,” in the same exact way he used to tell the boys, “Don’t cuss the weather.” Sometimes you can say dreadful things without knowing it. Nathan understood this better than I did. Like several of his one-sentence conversations, this one stuck in my mind and finally changed it. The change came too late, maybe, but it turned my mind inside out like a sock. … Was I sorry that I had known my parents and Grandmam and Ora Finley and the Catletts and the Feltners, and that I had married Virgil and come to live in Port William, and that I had lived on after Virgil’s death to marry Nathan and come to our place to raise our family and live among the Coulters and the rest of our family? Well, that was the chance I had. …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.
• Jim: This is Hannah reflecting on her life and it is only part of a longer passage that is beautiful: “But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.”
Reviews:
https://preachthestory.com/hannah-cou...
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2016/w...
https://vincereview.blogspot.com/2020...
My edition is from a publishing house that I have not heard of, Shoemaker & Hoard (2004).
May 18, 2019
[2.5] I am both disappointed and unmoved by Hannah Coulter I knew it was going to be a "quiet" novel about an elderly woman's contemplations about her past. For a while I enjoyed her memories. And Berry writes well.
But the novel is so insular it stopped making sense to me. Hannah Coulter lives in Kentucky in the 1930s to early 2000s yet she is completely cut off from the outside world. The only outside event mentioned is WWII, even though Hannah and Nathan have a son who seems to have been of age to be drafted in Vietnam. Vietnam is never mentioned. There is no racism or race in this novel. There are no blacks in Port William? The Coulters live on a farm with "employees." But who are they? Around the half way point I became too distracted by what wasn't mentioned to enjoy the novel.
But the novel is so insular it stopped making sense to me. Hannah Coulter lives in Kentucky in the 1930s to early 2000s yet she is completely cut off from the outside world. The only outside event mentioned is WWII, even though Hannah and Nathan have a son who seems to have been of age to be drafted in Vietnam. Vietnam is never mentioned. There is no racism or race in this novel. There are no blacks in Port William? The Coulters live on a farm with "employees." But who are they? Around the half way point I became too distracted by what wasn't mentioned to enjoy the novel.
October 20, 2021
This story continues the story of those who call Port William, Kentucky home, sharing the life and thoughts of Hannah Coulter on her life, her family and the ever-changing world.
Growing up during the Depression years on a farm, Hannah had learned how to make do with little, and her dreams for the future were not dreams filled with an easy life of wealth, but with more realistic expectations. After finishing high school, she finds a job working for an attorney as his secretary. Time passes and she marries Virgil, becomes pregnant with their daughter, and not long after, loses her husband in the Battle of the Bulge.
’His story after the war, and especially after 1948, I know because it is my story, too. It is our story, for I lived it with him. It is the story of our place in our time: our farm of “150 acres more or less,” as the deed says, on the ridges and slopes above the creek known as Sand Ripple that runs down from Port William to the river. Nathan bought it in that year of 1948, hoping I would marry him, or in case I would, thinking he would need a place of his own to take me to.
Our story is the story our place: how we married and came here, moved into this old house and made it livable again while we lived in it; how we raised our children here, and worked and hoped and paid the mortgage, and made a pretty good farm of a place that had been hard used and then almost forgotten; how we continued making our life here day by day, after the children were gone; how we kept this place alive and plentiful, seeing it always as a place beyond the war--Nathan seeing it, as I now think, as if from inside a fire, how we got old, and Nathan died, and I have remained on for yet a little while to see how such lives as ours and such a place may fare in a bad time.
This is the story of my life, that while I lived it it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed. So close to the end now, what do I look forward to? “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Some morning, I pray, I’ll have the good happiness of “the man who woke up the dead.” who Burley Coulter used to tell about.
This is my story, my giving of thanks.’
After the end of the war, and time has passed, Nathan enters her life and slowly begins to enter her heart, as well. Eventually, they marry, and their family increases over time.
Theirs isn’t an easy life, but it has its own rewards. A gentle peacefulness, a willingness to care for each other in ways that don’t often involve grandiose gestures, but small, meaningful ones.
’When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you don’t know it.’
A moving, simple, and simply beautiful elegy to another time, a way of life that seems to have all but disappeared.
Growing up during the Depression years on a farm, Hannah had learned how to make do with little, and her dreams for the future were not dreams filled with an easy life of wealth, but with more realistic expectations. After finishing high school, she finds a job working for an attorney as his secretary. Time passes and she marries Virgil, becomes pregnant with their daughter, and not long after, loses her husband in the Battle of the Bulge.
’His story after the war, and especially after 1948, I know because it is my story, too. It is our story, for I lived it with him. It is the story of our place in our time: our farm of “150 acres more or less,” as the deed says, on the ridges and slopes above the creek known as Sand Ripple that runs down from Port William to the river. Nathan bought it in that year of 1948, hoping I would marry him, or in case I would, thinking he would need a place of his own to take me to.
Our story is the story our place: how we married and came here, moved into this old house and made it livable again while we lived in it; how we raised our children here, and worked and hoped and paid the mortgage, and made a pretty good farm of a place that had been hard used and then almost forgotten; how we continued making our life here day by day, after the children were gone; how we kept this place alive and plentiful, seeing it always as a place beyond the war--Nathan seeing it, as I now think, as if from inside a fire, how we got old, and Nathan died, and I have remained on for yet a little while to see how such lives as ours and such a place may fare in a bad time.
This is the story of my life, that while I lived it it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed. So close to the end now, what do I look forward to? “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Some morning, I pray, I’ll have the good happiness of “the man who woke up the dead.” who Burley Coulter used to tell about.
This is my story, my giving of thanks.’
After the end of the war, and time has passed, Nathan enters her life and slowly begins to enter her heart, as well. Eventually, they marry, and their family increases over time.
Theirs isn’t an easy life, but it has its own rewards. A gentle peacefulness, a willingness to care for each other in ways that don’t often involve grandiose gestures, but small, meaningful ones.
’When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you don’t know it.’
A moving, simple, and simply beautiful elegy to another time, a way of life that seems to have all but disappeared.
February 12, 2021
A generic and a simple story.
November 20, 2021
4.5🧂🧂🧂🧂
Berry’s fictional township of Port William is where the reader can find characters who call to mind the best humanity has to offer.
Each book in the series focuses on a particular member who may show up in another book, earlier or later in their life. It matters not what order they are read in.
What matters most, for me at least, is that I come away with solace: comfort and consolation in a time of distress or sadness. Close to Hannah Coulter’s age, I too am spending time these days looking back (I sure don't want to look forward).
I can’t think of another group of fictional people I’d rather spend time with. The Atticus Finches of the world live in the pages.
Berry’s fictional township of Port William is where the reader can find characters who call to mind the best humanity has to offer.
Each book in the series focuses on a particular member who may show up in another book, earlier or later in their life. It matters not what order they are read in.
What matters most, for me at least, is that I come away with solace: comfort and consolation in a time of distress or sadness. Close to Hannah Coulter’s age, I too am spending time these days looking back (I sure don't want to look forward).
I can’t think of another group of fictional people I’d rather spend time with. The Atticus Finches of the world live in the pages.
June 17, 2013
This was a perfect follow-up to recently reading Berry’s Jayber Crow. It gave me a chance to revisit the fictitious farming community of Port William in north central Kentucky, which barber Jayber Crow considered as a form of heaven. In this tale, published four years later in 2004, Hannah marries into a clan of farmers in Port Royal at the onset of World War 2 and finds her version of bliss there. She records her memories, reflecting back from a point where she is an isolated widow at age 78. Her gospel is of love, and thankfulness:
There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.
Hannah assumes a lifetime “membership” in an extended family and their neighbors who work together and help each other. They cleave to her through her loss and grieving over her first husband, Virgil, a “missing in action” casualty at the Battle of the Bulge. And they come round several years later in support of her love and marriage to Nathan Coulter, one who survived the war, but who would never talk about the horrors he experienced in Okinawa beyond saying, “Ignorant boys, killing each other.”
The world events impinging upon the home front had dual effects. On the one hand, the war had a way of making their rural life seem small: Our minds were driven out of the old boundaries into the thought of absolute loss, absolute emptiness, in a world that seemed larger even than the sky that held it.
Paradoxically, it also reinforced the value of their special island of sanity and caring. For Nathan: He had come back after the war because he wanted to. He was where he wanted to be. As I too was by then, he was a member of Port William. …members of Port William aren’t trying to “get someplace.” They think they are someplace.
They build up a family farm together and raise her daughter with Virgil and two sons of their own. The story Hannah revisits of her courtship with Nathan is movingly rendered, a part of the path to be bound into community: 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.
Whereas the novel Jayber Crow had a focus on the assaults upon traditional agrarian ways after the war due to the rise of agribusiness, Hannah Coulter dwells on the decline of family farming due to the next generation of children taking up work in cities. While she maintains a fervent hope that one of her grandchildren will take over the farm, her memory alone is a way to keep her people and their way of life alive:
When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.
This is the seventh of eight independent novels of this place, a record supplemented by dozens of short stories. I can see how it is considered by some as a special distillation by Berry of what Port William has to teach us. Given that the community seems a lot like that of his own rural origin in Kentucky and of the site of the homestead he established in his 30s, it is natural that he uses his stories to illustrate the vision behind his essays and activist work. I imagine many of my Goodreads friends would find this book too bland for its want of dramatic plotting or might object to violations of the rule of “telling instead of showing”, given how Hannah sums up so much in broad strokes. There is a message pointed to by the story, but does that make it preaching?
For me, I don’t feel preached at, but more like the beneficiary of the poet in Berry. Judge for yourself in the following passage:
One of the happiest moments of my walks is when I get to where I can hear the branch. The water comes down in a hurry, tossing itself this way and that as it tumbles among the broken pieces of old sea bottom. The stream seems to be talking, saying any number of things as it goes along. … If our place has a voice, this is it. And it is not talking to you. You can’t understand a thing it is saying. You walk up and stand beside it, loving it, and you know it doesn’t care whether you love it or not. The steam and woods don’t care if you love them. The place doesn’t care if you love it. For your own sake you had better love it. For the sake of all else you love, you had better love it.
My rural background and appreciation for Berry’s advocacy of small farmers perhaps makes me more receptive to the paean for a disappearing way of life than others. The rhythms of the seasons determine so much about the rhythms of life in this community, and it makes a nostalgic song I love to hear. As a reader, I feel a sense of bounty, which is vividly focused in this passage:
You look around presently, and it is summer. It has been dry for a while, maybe, and not it has rained. The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflies that fly up in a flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.
Hannah assumes a lifetime “membership” in an extended family and their neighbors who work together and help each other. They cleave to her through her loss and grieving over her first husband, Virgil, a “missing in action” casualty at the Battle of the Bulge. And they come round several years later in support of her love and marriage to Nathan Coulter, one who survived the war, but who would never talk about the horrors he experienced in Okinawa beyond saying, “Ignorant boys, killing each other.”
The world events impinging upon the home front had dual effects. On the one hand, the war had a way of making their rural life seem small: Our minds were driven out of the old boundaries into the thought of absolute loss, absolute emptiness, in a world that seemed larger even than the sky that held it.
Paradoxically, it also reinforced the value of their special island of sanity and caring. For Nathan: He had come back after the war because he wanted to. He was where he wanted to be. As I too was by then, he was a member of Port William. …members of Port William aren’t trying to “get someplace.” They think they are someplace.
They build up a family farm together and raise her daughter with Virgil and two sons of their own. The story Hannah revisits of her courtship with Nathan is movingly rendered, a part of the path to be bound into community: 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.
Whereas the novel Jayber Crow had a focus on the assaults upon traditional agrarian ways after the war due to the rise of agribusiness, Hannah Coulter dwells on the decline of family farming due to the next generation of children taking up work in cities. While she maintains a fervent hope that one of her grandchildren will take over the farm, her memory alone is a way to keep her people and their way of life alive:
When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.
This is the seventh of eight independent novels of this place, a record supplemented by dozens of short stories. I can see how it is considered by some as a special distillation by Berry of what Port William has to teach us. Given that the community seems a lot like that of his own rural origin in Kentucky and of the site of the homestead he established in his 30s, it is natural that he uses his stories to illustrate the vision behind his essays and activist work. I imagine many of my Goodreads friends would find this book too bland for its want of dramatic plotting or might object to violations of the rule of “telling instead of showing”, given how Hannah sums up so much in broad strokes. There is a message pointed to by the story, but does that make it preaching?
For me, I don’t feel preached at, but more like the beneficiary of the poet in Berry. Judge for yourself in the following passage:
One of the happiest moments of my walks is when I get to where I can hear the branch. The water comes down in a hurry, tossing itself this way and that as it tumbles among the broken pieces of old sea bottom. The stream seems to be talking, saying any number of things as it goes along. … If our place has a voice, this is it. And it is not talking to you. You can’t understand a thing it is saying. You walk up and stand beside it, loving it, and you know it doesn’t care whether you love it or not. The steam and woods don’t care if you love them. The place doesn’t care if you love it. For your own sake you had better love it. For the sake of all else you love, you had better love it.
My rural background and appreciation for Berry’s advocacy of small farmers perhaps makes me more receptive to the paean for a disappearing way of life than others. The rhythms of the seasons determine so much about the rhythms of life in this community, and it makes a nostalgic song I love to hear. As a reader, I feel a sense of bounty, which is vividly focused in this passage:
You look around presently, and it is summer. It has been dry for a while, maybe, and not it has rained. The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflies that fly up in a flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
October 3, 2020
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berryis one of my favourite books of 2020.
The story is narrated by Hannah Coulter and centres around a fictional town called Port William (I looked it up on Maps, with no joy) in a Kentucky farming community. Berry takes us across several generations, introducing the reader to the family, relatives, lovers and friends Hannah encounters throughout her life. I was worried I wouldn’t remember them all, but Berry treats the reader with absolute care in this regard. We learn about them slowly, in aliquots, he throws in reminders of who is who – this reader had no trouble remembering them all!
The real star of this piece is the prose. My first Berry book, I just fell into his velvet glove. He described the town of Port William and surrounds beautifully. He dedicates himself to painting a picture, but more importantly he gives the physical surrounds a life.
It’s as if the place exists, lives and owns its history, present and future in spite of the characters, but also because of them They’re intertwined, and separate. I hope that isn’t too garbled and makes some sort of sense.
The loves of her life in Virgil and Nathan, occupy two very different times, and Hannah is a very different person in each of these relationships – but the love stories as depicted, are presented so beautifully and so compellingly. This book challenged me to think about relationships as being transient in nature, we pass through them and they pass through us, no matter how heavy the ordeal. It’s all temporary, our relationships have a past, present and future – even if the person isn’t around anymore.
Berry writes such wonderful stuff like:
Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it.
This next one really struck a chord with me:
But you are still living, and living your life, expectations subtracted, has a shape, and the shape of it includes the past. The absent and the dead are in it
Too right, I read and re-read this passage, I put the book (kindle) on my chest and thought about my Dad essentially, my best friend who passed a couple of years back. He is a part of my life and he’s “still in it”. Sometimes reading a passage like this is needed to remind us.
There was one interesting passage later in the book, describing a WWII battle scene in Okinawa involving Nathan. Jesus receives a big mention in a very significant way. It’s not as though any of the characters, or Nathan for that matter, seemed particularly Christian – so it wasn’t mentioned in that context – it just popped up. I thought it was a bit “preachy”, but I may have missed the point.
Hannah is a wonderful character and those around her are described with warmth and depth. The family was not without problems and difficulties but – they were all wrapped up in a cosy quilt of love, history, familiarity and hope.
I’m not a handy guy by any stretch, but this book makes me want to throw on a pair of overalls (if I had them) and go outside, with a piece of straw in my mouth and hammer something into place. Or chop something into pieces. In fact, I might go and do that right now……..maybe I could milk my Pup? …………*Pup looking nervous*.
Wonderful stuff – I am going to read a lot of this guy’s work. Isn’t reading the best?
5 Stars
The story is narrated by Hannah Coulter and centres around a fictional town called Port William (I looked it up on Maps, with no joy) in a Kentucky farming community. Berry takes us across several generations, introducing the reader to the family, relatives, lovers and friends Hannah encounters throughout her life. I was worried I wouldn’t remember them all, but Berry treats the reader with absolute care in this regard. We learn about them slowly, in aliquots, he throws in reminders of who is who – this reader had no trouble remembering them all!
The real star of this piece is the prose. My first Berry book, I just fell into his velvet glove. He described the town of Port William and surrounds beautifully. He dedicates himself to painting a picture, but more importantly he gives the physical surrounds a life.
It’s as if the place exists, lives and owns its history, present and future in spite of the characters, but also because of them They’re intertwined, and separate. I hope that isn’t too garbled and makes some sort of sense.
The loves of her life in Virgil and Nathan, occupy two very different times, and Hannah is a very different person in each of these relationships – but the love stories as depicted, are presented so beautifully and so compellingly. This book challenged me to think about relationships as being transient in nature, we pass through them and they pass through us, no matter how heavy the ordeal. It’s all temporary, our relationships have a past, present and future – even if the person isn’t around anymore.
Berry writes such wonderful stuff like:
Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it.
This next one really struck a chord with me:
But you are still living, and living your life, expectations subtracted, has a shape, and the shape of it includes the past. The absent and the dead are in it
Too right, I read and re-read this passage, I put the book (kindle) on my chest and thought about my Dad essentially, my best friend who passed a couple of years back. He is a part of my life and he’s “still in it”. Sometimes reading a passage like this is needed to remind us.
There was one interesting passage later in the book, describing a WWII battle scene in Okinawa involving Nathan. Jesus receives a big mention in a very significant way. It’s not as though any of the characters, or Nathan for that matter, seemed particularly Christian – so it wasn’t mentioned in that context – it just popped up. I thought it was a bit “preachy”, but I may have missed the point.
Hannah is a wonderful character and those around her are described with warmth and depth. The family was not without problems and difficulties but – they were all wrapped up in a cosy quilt of love, history, familiarity and hope.
I’m not a handy guy by any stretch, but this book makes me want to throw on a pair of overalls (if I had them) and go outside, with a piece of straw in my mouth and hammer something into place. Or chop something into pieces. In fact, I might go and do that right now……..maybe I could milk my Pup? …………*Pup looking nervous*.
Wonderful stuff – I am going to read a lot of this guy’s work. Isn’t reading the best?
5 Stars
August 4, 2020
"Most people now are looking for 'a better place,'which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no 'better place' than this, not in 'this' world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven."
"Hannah Coulter" is a delightful book in Wendell Berry's series about the people in the fictional Port William, Kentucky. It's a nostalgic look at rural farm life, good values, and caring neighbors.
Hannah is a twice-widowed elderly narrator looking back at her life in the country. She was raised on a farm, and worked as a secretary for a short time before marrying Virgil. Her happy life was upended when Virgil died in World War II while she was pregnant with his daughter. A few years later she married Nathan, and they raised their children on a farm. Both Hannah and Nathan had a strong love for the land, and hoped to pass the farm on to their children. Like many other young adults of their generation, they were tempted by life in the city during their college years. The loss of small family farms is a theme of this story, although it ends with a note of hope that the Coulter farm might live on.
Hannah is a warm woman who I can imagine spending time with as we savored good coffee and freshly baked biscuits. I often felt misty-eyed as she dealt with losses, and celebrated with her as she found love and contentment. Author Wendell Berry is also a poet which makes his lovely prose a joy to read.
"Hannah Coulter" is a delightful book in Wendell Berry's series about the people in the fictional Port William, Kentucky. It's a nostalgic look at rural farm life, good values, and caring neighbors.
Hannah is a twice-widowed elderly narrator looking back at her life in the country. She was raised on a farm, and worked as a secretary for a short time before marrying Virgil. Her happy life was upended when Virgil died in World War II while she was pregnant with his daughter. A few years later she married Nathan, and they raised their children on a farm. Both Hannah and Nathan had a strong love for the land, and hoped to pass the farm on to their children. Like many other young adults of their generation, they were tempted by life in the city during their college years. The loss of small family farms is a theme of this story, although it ends with a note of hope that the Coulter farm might live on.
Hannah is a warm woman who I can imagine spending time with as we savored good coffee and freshly baked biscuits. I often felt misty-eyed as she dealt with losses, and celebrated with her as she found love and contentment. Author Wendell Berry is also a poet which makes his lovely prose a joy to read.
January 17, 2009
Such an insightful book. The sentimental in me really was affected by Hannah's memories and observations of the changing times. It definitely increased my longing to be a part of a community (a "membership", if you will). Anyone want to be a part of my community? We'll all move out to the country and live within walking distance of each other, our kids will grow up together, and we'll experience life's joys and sorrows together. Seriously, when I read books like this, I realize just how old-fashioned I really am. They make me want to be more agrarian: have a garden, know my neighbors better, move closer to home. I loved Nathan and his ability to "live his life", come what may (made me think of Elder Wirthlin). While this book made me a little fearful for the future day when my children will leave me and live their own lives, I couldn't help but look to Nathan, and then Hannah, for hope.
July 4, 2020
The first time I read Hannah Coulter I did not love it. I believe it was because I did not like what I perceived as the barrenness of Hannah's later years. Now that my own nest is empty, it is more helpful to read how to make a rich life after the children are gone. There are times when Berry's maleness does shine through in this novel but even so, it is a pretty perceptive book on the changing times and all that it means to men and to women.
October 3, 2015
I had enjoyed Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow” so much I was eager to befriend another character that lived in the same community. It is lovely to return to Port William, Kentucky. I derive pleasure in getting to know Jayber’s friends in a new way. There is Burley Coulter, the life-wire of any party and a talented storyteller. There is consistency in the caring solicitude of Danny and Lyda Branch, the “salt of the earth” couple. The abundant goodwill makes membership in Port William something to covet.
The narrator, Hannah Coulter, says, "This is my story, my giving of thanks." Indeed, her story seems to me in essence a song of praise. It is an appraisal of a life weighed down by pain and heartache that nonetheless overflows with gratitude. That life is a “dream dreamed”.
Hannah is twelve when her mother dies unexpectedly and she learns about grief. When his father remarries, she has to live with a stepmother who has no love for her and two sleaze bags for step-brothers. Her grandmother becomes her guardian angel and paves her way to independence after high school. Hannah falls in love with Virgil Feltner and they marry just before the war. As I am given to know early that her happiness is short lived, I savor her joy like a commodity that is running out and wait in dread for the inevitable. Virgil goes missing in the war when Hannah is pregnant with their baby girl. Because he is never found, she does not have closure, which must have been so hard for her. She eventually marries Nathan Coulter, a kind farmer who has survived the Battle of Okinawa and they both settle into a life of industry, raising three children who subsequently seek a life beyond their farm.
Like “Jayber Crow”, this story is set against the larger backdrop of WWII. The war is always on the minds of the Port William folks but no one is able to speak about it and the pain goes underground. Yet, the message that rings clearly is that life goes on. Nathan’s mantra is: "We're going to live right on." And that is exactly what happens.
Wendell Berry strikes me as an author who is acquainted with grief. In the experience of Hannah and the other Port William folks, he expresses the isolation of one who is grieving. Grief is multifaceted: "shame for the terrible selfishness and loneliness of grief", "fear of the difference between your grief and anybody else's". Grief also demands “honesty, an unwillingness to act as if loss and grief and suffering are extraordinary". Grief is courageously and quietly borne.
However, what this story leaves behind is not grief. The more I read Hannah's story, the more I realize it is about kindness and gratitude. It is encouraging to read about Little Margaret and Nathan calling Hannah back to life from the depths of her grief. In Hannah's recollection, "Love held us. Kindness held us." When the nest is empty and the farm house starts to languish from the strains of wear and tear, Hannah and Nathan continue to find pleasure in everyday things. In her words, "Life without expectations was still life and life was still good. We loved each other and lived right on. We sat down to the food we had grown and ate it and praised it and were thankful for it." There is also a sense that in life, sadness is bound up in joy. The same is observed in "Jayber Crow". Hannah describes her house this way, "Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift."
I appreciate this book for the wonderful points of view it offers about quotidian life as much as the questions it raises about what gives it meaning or substance. How do we bear the weight of living? What sustains us when we “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"? I value what Hannah says about love: "Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. Love is "prepared in the long day, in the work of years, in the keeping of faith, in kindness." Hannah alludes to the “room of love”, a sanctuary preserved by memory where the absent continues to be present and the dead never dies. How beautiful! There is no want of uplifting thoughts on contentment, gratitude, courage and endurance that flow naturally as Hannah reflects on her childhood, marriage and children, and aging.
In many ways, this story reminds me of Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead’ and “Home” because they seem to share the same perspective that there are "a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient." Great book.
August 6, 2020
Wendell Berry has created a masterpiece in his collection of Port William stories. I am only now familiar with two members but will get to know the entire membership before long! Hannah's story is a remembrance of her life, a telling of the place that holds such meaning to her and of the people whom she dearly loves. The two are intertwined for Hannah.
"Now I know what we were trying to stand for, and what I believe we did stand for: the possibility that among the world's wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place."
I love a story that is a life's retelling. It allows you, the reader, to follow along and feel with the characters. I also adore character driven stories. Berry is amazing at creating characters that are relatable, likable and knowable. I can relate to the relationship Hannah has with her children and can see my own family's saga in hers. When Mattie, Margaret and Caleb found their way in life outside of Port William, I kept hearing my dad's words before I walked down the aisle telling me not to forget where I came from. I think Hannah was hoping the same for her three children. However, what she and Nathan learned after they all left was, "The way of education leads away from home."
"The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, .....but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on. I didn't see this at first..... I didn't want it to be true."
Hannah remembered a good life with love, faith, family, friends, plenty, hard work, disappointments, grief, a life with surprises that may not have been what was expected.
"Life without expectations was still life, and life was still good. The light that had lighted us into this world was lighting us through it. We loved each other and lived right on. We sat down to the food we had grown and ate it and praised it and were thankful for it. We suffered the thoughts of the nights and at dawn woke up and went back to work. The world that so often had disappointed us and made us sorrowful sometimes made us happy by surprise."
Hannah Coulter is a beautiful, quiet, serene story that will linger on in my memory for a very long time!
"Now I know what we were trying to stand for, and what I believe we did stand for: the possibility that among the world's wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place."
I love a story that is a life's retelling. It allows you, the reader, to follow along and feel with the characters. I also adore character driven stories. Berry is amazing at creating characters that are relatable, likable and knowable. I can relate to the relationship Hannah has with her children and can see my own family's saga in hers. When Mattie, Margaret and Caleb found their way in life outside of Port William, I kept hearing my dad's words before I walked down the aisle telling me not to forget where I came from. I think Hannah was hoping the same for her three children. However, what she and Nathan learned after they all left was, "The way of education leads away from home."
"The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, .....but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on. I didn't see this at first..... I didn't want it to be true."
Hannah remembered a good life with love, faith, family, friends, plenty, hard work, disappointments, grief, a life with surprises that may not have been what was expected.
"Life without expectations was still life, and life was still good. The light that had lighted us into this world was lighting us through it. We loved each other and lived right on. We sat down to the food we had grown and ate it and praised it and were thankful for it. We suffered the thoughts of the nights and at dawn woke up and went back to work. The world that so often had disappointed us and made us sorrowful sometimes made us happy by surprise."
Hannah Coulter is a beautiful, quiet, serene story that will linger on in my memory for a very long time!
April 22, 2017
“I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.”
Oh, how I loved this book. Wendell Berry is truly a national treasure. While I've previously read many of his poems and essays, Hannah Coulter represents my first experience with Berry's fiction.
"Coulter" is one of the last installments of Berry's novels which are set in the fictional town of Port William, KY. This book stands alone, as I imagine the others do. In this narrative, Hannah Coulter, now in her late 70s, looks back on her life, her family, her friends, and the town in which she spent her entire life. This is a "quiet" and reflective book, powerful in its imagery, sense of place, prose, and meaning. Fans of Elizabeth Strout and Anna Quindlen's Miller's Valley will feel right at home in the pages of Berry's book.
Hannah Coulter is a woman who hasn't had an easy life. She is never defiant, but she certainly has not been defeated by life either. With dignity, she stands as a symbol of the changing American economy -- and culture -- from the 1930s through the 1970s.
While Berry writes of simpler times in Port William, he doesn't stray into cloying sentimentality. It took me a long time to make my first visit to Port William, and I'll be making a return visit soon.
Oh, how I loved this book. Wendell Berry is truly a national treasure. While I've previously read many of his poems and essays, Hannah Coulter represents my first experience with Berry's fiction.
"Coulter" is one of the last installments of Berry's novels which are set in the fictional town of Port William, KY. This book stands alone, as I imagine the others do. In this narrative, Hannah Coulter, now in her late 70s, looks back on her life, her family, her friends, and the town in which she spent her entire life. This is a "quiet" and reflective book, powerful in its imagery, sense of place, prose, and meaning. Fans of Elizabeth Strout and Anna Quindlen's Miller's Valley will feel right at home in the pages of Berry's book.
Hannah Coulter is a woman who hasn't had an easy life. She is never defiant, but she certainly has not been defeated by life either. With dignity, she stands as a symbol of the changing American economy -- and culture -- from the 1930s through the 1970s.
While Berry writes of simpler times in Port William, he doesn't stray into cloying sentimentality. It took me a long time to make my first visit to Port William, and I'll be making a return visit soon.
November 21, 2021
Some novels take you on a ride, to places unfamiliar or perhaps familiar but newly imagined. Some novels sit you down and gently rock you, shushing you, whispering in your ear and pointing out all the magic around you that you don't see when you are hurrying through life. Hannah Coulter was just such a novel. If you're looking for a race car or roller coaster, you'll probably want to skip it.
I did not immediately love this book because I was sticking my thumb out for a lift. But as the cars passed without stopping, I found myself lulled into a different state of mind and realized I was listening to my grandmother, my uncle and even myself as I near the end of my life. I settled into the rocker and found recognizable land, comfort and peace.
We join Hannah in her memories--leaving home, her two marriages, raising children, taking on the demands of a home and farm, and losing the people she cares about. There is a strong sense of "place" in this story; a community where people have lived their entire lives--where some stay and others leave; where the culture of a farming community begins to change as children fail to take on homesteads, opting instead to move to cities and rarely coming home even to visit. There are musings about lost connections, lost shared language, lost ways of life; about the nature of marriage and parenting; about trauma and death; about losing your way but finding your way back--all balanced out with a sense of purpose, resilience, hope, forgiveness, and love.
Among other things, Berry captures the nature of raising children and seeing them spring off into the world, leaving a human sized hole in the heart of some parents/grandparents. It resonated.
"He fits my love, but he no longer fits the place or our life or the knowledge of anything here. Since a long time ago, when he has come back he has come a stranger."..."And what ever in their lives they think of the old woman they will barely remember who yearned toward them and longed to teach them to know her a little and who wanted to give them more hugs and kisses than she ever was able to?"
I'd not read Berry before, but others indicate this quiet read is typical for him. It was a good antidote to a world rife with metaphorical car accidents.
I did not immediately love this book because I was sticking my thumb out for a lift. But as the cars passed without stopping, I found myself lulled into a different state of mind and realized I was listening to my grandmother, my uncle and even myself as I near the end of my life. I settled into the rocker and found recognizable land, comfort and peace.
We join Hannah in her memories--leaving home, her two marriages, raising children, taking on the demands of a home and farm, and losing the people she cares about. There is a strong sense of "place" in this story; a community where people have lived their entire lives--where some stay and others leave; where the culture of a farming community begins to change as children fail to take on homesteads, opting instead to move to cities and rarely coming home even to visit. There are musings about lost connections, lost shared language, lost ways of life; about the nature of marriage and parenting; about trauma and death; about losing your way but finding your way back--all balanced out with a sense of purpose, resilience, hope, forgiveness, and love.
Among other things, Berry captures the nature of raising children and seeing them spring off into the world, leaving a human sized hole in the heart of some parents/grandparents. It resonated.
"He fits my love, but he no longer fits the place or our life or the knowledge of anything here. Since a long time ago, when he has come back he has come a stranger."..."And what ever in their lives they think of the old woman they will barely remember who yearned toward them and longed to teach them to know her a little and who wanted to give them more hugs and kisses than she ever was able to?"
I'd not read Berry before, but others indicate this quiet read is typical for him. It was a good antidote to a world rife with metaphorical car accidents.
July 3, 2020
Wendell Berry, a favorite author, takes us once again to the small farming town of Port William Kentucky in this insightful story of Hannah Coulter the first female protagonist in this read alone series. Hannah is old now but is recollecting her life as a poor farmer’s daughter
who became a wife two separate times to men who served in WWll with only one returning to help her build a hardworking but well appreciated life on their “own place.” I really enjoy Berry’s writing which is deceptively simple in its prose and wisdom.
Read for On The Southern Literary Trail club. 5 stars
who became a wife two separate times to men who served in WWll with only one returning to help her build a hardworking but well appreciated life on their “own place.” I really enjoy Berry’s writing which is deceptively simple in its prose and wisdom.
Read for On The Southern Literary Trail club. 5 stars
Read
April 24, 2024I am not going to rate this one. Unfortunately for this poor novel, it was the wrong time for me to read this book.
I will say that this is a quiet, thoughtful novel written in Berry's trademark understated prose.
I will say that this is a quiet, thoughtful novel written in Berry's trademark understated prose.
August 16, 2023
Five pages in I knew this book would ruin me! This is a story of nothing at all and everything all at once. Pure, tender, quiet love and simplicity that will only be appreciated by those that enjoy things so beautiful they hurt. No book I read will ever compare to this one, but I suppose I’ll live right on.
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 everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
P.S. One should read this novel in the warmth of May or June, because it is simply fitting to do so.
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 everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
P.S. One should read this novel in the warmth of May or June, because it is simply fitting to do so.
May 14, 2017
This is so poetic and thoughtful. So genuine I had to keep checking to see that this was fiction. Hannah is so real. This review by John describes it so well:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Thank you to Lora for urging me to read this.
4.5
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Thank you to Lora for urging me to read this.
4.5
December 27, 2021
4.5 stars
8 hours:10 minutes
I listened to the unabridged audiobook Hannah Coulter written by Wendell Berry and read by Susan Denaker and followed along with the Kindle version on my tablet. Susan Denaker's narration is excellent and enhanced the story.
Berry is one of the great American voices. If you have not yet discovered the deep pleasure of his writing, Hannah Coulter is a fine place to start.
In this installment of Wendell Berry's acclaimed story about the citizens of Port William, Kentucky, Hannah Coulter sorts through her memories. Twice widowed, alone and in her late seventies, Hannah recalls childhood, young love and loss, raising children, and the changing of seasons. She offers her steady voice as she contemplates the deterioration of community, with wise and often fiery opinions about the way things were, are, and might have been.
I agree with the following two quotes about this novel.
"The form of this tale resembles not so much what we expect of a traditional novel – the accumulation of scenes into a dramatic arc – as it does a testament, a life sketched in broad outline, then reflected upon by the teller. The stripped-down approach, as old-fashioned as the gospels that Hannah lives by, is compelling… [Hannah's] voice becomes prophetic, and her empathy lifts her story beyond any lament for the dead and into a challenge for the living." - The Washington Post
"[Hannah's] tale is, if uneventful on its surface, intensely felt and eloquently sketched, fertile in quiet virtues and rich in loyalties… Barry renders abstractions like community and home as breathing organisms..."
- San Francisco Chronicle
Wendell Berry has been honoured with several Awards. I can certainly understand why, after reading Hannah Coulter. Author of more than forty books, fiction, and essays, he has farmed a hillside in his native, Henry County, Kentucky, together with his wife, for more than forty years.
I am adding Wendell Berry as one of my favourite authors and am glad that he has written many books about Port William and the people there.
Special thanks to C, C, D, and A. The comments, thoughtful dialogue, and sharing of quotes and results of research and insight
enriched my reading experience.
4.5 stars ⭐️️⭐️️⭐️️⭐️️💫
8 hours:10 minutes
I listened to the unabridged audiobook Hannah Coulter written by Wendell Berry and read by Susan Denaker and followed along with the Kindle version on my tablet. Susan Denaker's narration is excellent and enhanced the story.
Berry is one of the great American voices. If you have not yet discovered the deep pleasure of his writing, Hannah Coulter is a fine place to start.
In this installment of Wendell Berry's acclaimed story about the citizens of Port William, Kentucky, Hannah Coulter sorts through her memories. Twice widowed, alone and in her late seventies, Hannah recalls childhood, young love and loss, raising children, and the changing of seasons. She offers her steady voice as she contemplates the deterioration of community, with wise and often fiery opinions about the way things were, are, and might have been.
I agree with the following two quotes about this novel.
"The form of this tale resembles not so much what we expect of a traditional novel – the accumulation of scenes into a dramatic arc – as it does a testament, a life sketched in broad outline, then reflected upon by the teller. The stripped-down approach, as old-fashioned as the gospels that Hannah lives by, is compelling… [Hannah's] voice becomes prophetic, and her empathy lifts her story beyond any lament for the dead and into a challenge for the living." - The Washington Post
"[Hannah's] tale is, if uneventful on its surface, intensely felt and eloquently sketched, fertile in quiet virtues and rich in loyalties… Barry renders abstractions like community and home as breathing organisms..."
- San Francisco Chronicle
Wendell Berry has been honoured with several Awards. I can certainly understand why, after reading Hannah Coulter. Author of more than forty books, fiction, and essays, he has farmed a hillside in his native, Henry County, Kentucky, together with his wife, for more than forty years.
I am adding Wendell Berry as one of my favourite authors and am glad that he has written many books about Port William and the people there.
Special thanks to C, C, D, and A. The comments, thoughtful dialogue, and sharing of quotes and results of research and insight
enriched my reading experience.
4.5 stars ⭐️️⭐️️⭐️️⭐️️💫
January 28, 2023
“I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.”
𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙗𝙤𝙤𝙠! This was my snowy day read a week ago today. Seemed fitting to finish on a lazy snow day.
So many recommended it to me. Kicking myself that it took so long.
This book made me slow down and savor reading. Just what I needed.
Rich themes that weave together- family, life, death, loss, grief, children, friendships, moral values, war, and so much more.
We get the POV of an old lady at the end of her life. She's recapping her life and being thankful. Usually I don't do well with these types of books but Berry has a way with words and making you feel you were there in person watching and listening.
Ready to jump into more of his books and this community of Port William.
𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙗𝙤𝙤𝙠! This was my snowy day read a week ago today. Seemed fitting to finish on a lazy snow day.
So many recommended it to me. Kicking myself that it took so long.
This book made me slow down and savor reading. Just what I needed.
Rich themes that weave together- family, life, death, loss, grief, children, friendships, moral values, war, and so much more.
We get the POV of an old lady at the end of her life. She's recapping her life and being thankful. Usually I don't do well with these types of books but Berry has a way with words and making you feel you were there in person watching and listening.
Ready to jump into more of his books and this community of Port William.
May 13, 2022
For the life of me, I'm finding any and all words inaccurate and insufficient to relay the painful beauty of Hannah's tough and tender resolution to her world.
Aside from having been "reset," in order to view one's own circumstances with a fresh eye and perspective, it would seem better to simply recommend a read of Wendell Berry's resilient Hannah.
Her words, through his incomparable pen, explain it so much better...
Aside from having been "reset," in order to view one's own circumstances with a fresh eye and perspective, it would seem better to simply recommend a read of Wendell Berry's resilient Hannah.
Her words, through his incomparable pen, explain it so much better...
November 2, 2020
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry is a warmly-rendered story illustrating the author's credo via an extended family of Kentucky folks who for the most part inhabit a world of "making do & doing without" but who take great pleasure in the land on which they and generations of their kind have called home. The primary focus of the novel is Hannah Coulter but Berry has created a community of characters whose universe might be said to mirror Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County on a much smaller & less primal scale, with a "not to scale" map of the area included at the end of the novel.
Often those who dwell within Wendell Berry's fictional territory seem somewhat lifeless & even androgynous and one has the feeling that the landscape is itself a primary character, a place where for example, Hannah's father "hoped for little & expected less".
However, with the knowledge that Berry is also a poet and an essayist and with some feeling for the the author's lifetime of advocacy for the area where he grew up, I gradually settled into the novel and asked less of the characters, enjoying the prose progressively more. What is represented is a community of essentially good people forced to confront the fact that family farms are being rendered increasingly difficult to sustain in an era of large corporate farms, with some smaller plots becoming "hobby farms" for wealthy weekenders from a nearby city but with Hannah & her family, particularly her husband Nathan, stoically enduring in the face of change.
It is said that their life and their work were not exactly the same but very closely resembled each other. Thus, as children drift off to university and with the lure of greater opportunities in the cities, a more modern world with ever-enhanced technological solutions to everyday problems, their elders are somewhat bereft but remain content to be sustained on the familiar homesteads that have nurtured generations of their kind. While one of Hannah's sons becomes the CEO of a firm based in California but with a global reach, it is said that "he doesn't have the strength to get free", being subject to the will of machines and a hectic work & travel schedule. Hannah laments:
The lesson of the novel and Berry's passionate endorsement of a code of the soil is quite idealistic & hopeful, a message aimed at a world that seems increasingly less so. As the novel puts it, "I had taught myself to know the world that is neither past nor to come, the present world where we are alive together and the world keeps us." Well said!
*Within my review are 3 photo images of Wendell Berry, the 3nd with Barack Obama presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Often those who dwell within Wendell Berry's fictional territory seem somewhat lifeless & even androgynous and one has the feeling that the landscape is itself a primary character, a place where for example, Hannah's father "hoped for little & expected less".
However, with the knowledge that Berry is also a poet and an essayist and with some feeling for the the author's lifetime of advocacy for the area where he grew up, I gradually settled into the novel and asked less of the characters, enjoying the prose progressively more. What is represented is a community of essentially good people forced to confront the fact that family farms are being rendered increasingly difficult to sustain in an era of large corporate farms, with some smaller plots becoming "hobby farms" for wealthy weekenders from a nearby city but with Hannah & her family, particularly her husband Nathan, stoically enduring in the face of change.
It is said that their life and their work were not exactly the same but very closely resembled each other. Thus, as children drift off to university and with the lure of greater opportunities in the cities, a more modern world with ever-enhanced technological solutions to everyday problems, their elders are somewhat bereft but remain content to be sustained on the familiar homesteads that have nurtured generations of their kind. While one of Hannah's sons becomes the CEO of a firm based in California but with a global reach, it is said that "he doesn't have the strength to get free", being subject to the will of machines and a hectic work & travel schedule. Hannah laments:
I take some blame on myself. Maybe, given the times & the fashions, it couldn't have happened in any other way but I am sorry for my gullibility at the way things turned out. I who never went to college was desperate for my children to go to college because we felt that we owed it to them. It just never occurred to us that we would lose them that way. The way of education leads away from home. This is what we learned from our children's education. In order to move up, you have got to move on. And for a short while after I knew this, I pretended that I didn't because I didn't want it to be true.It is somewhat difficult to compare this novel favorably with the rural tales by Edna Ferber or Marilynne Robinson or Willa Cather but Wendell Berry's book is still a story to be reckoned with, one that imparts to the reader how the land can nurture those who respect it & treat it gently, acting as an important, almost spiritual force in the lives of those who dwell on it.
The lesson of the novel and Berry's passionate endorsement of a code of the soil is quite idealistic & hopeful, a message aimed at a world that seems increasingly less so. As the novel puts it, "I had taught myself to know the world that is neither past nor to come, the present world where we are alive together and the world keeps us." Well said!
*Within my review are 3 photo images of Wendell Berry, the 3nd with Barack Obama presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
August 15, 2020
All my life I have heard church congregations singing of “A Balm of Gilead”. To be honest, I had no idea what that referred to, but I sure liked the sound of it. It sounded like something that can be used to soothe a troubled soul, which is doubtless why it came to mind when I was reading this book. Hannah Coulter is a very gentle tale of a life spent on a farm in northern Kentucky. It moves much more slowly than the turbulent times we live in. It lacks conflict and has no villains to speak of. My first impression was that, while it is a nice book, it was not really my kind of story, but I read on anyway. Then I started to see bits and pieces of my own story in it. When Hannah talked about grandchildren coming to visit who were more engaged with their cell phones than with the wonders of nature, I thought of my own children and how different their lives are from what mine was when I was young. Then I heard my own father’s voice I the words spoken by Nathan and I came to understand a point of view about mortality that I have struggled with for decades. It was then that I realized how truly insidious this book really is. It has insinuated itself into my heart and helped me to understand and appreciate my own life.
Bottom line: Told in a first-person narrative style that is a perfect example of the Appalachian oral tradition, This fictional memoir of an old woman is a true delight that takes the reader away from the fast-paced life too many of us live today to a slower, gentler time. I highly recommend it.
My thanks to Diane and all the folks at the On the Southern Literary Trail group for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books.
Bottom line: Told in a first-person narrative style that is a perfect example of the Appalachian oral tradition, This fictional memoir of an old woman is a true delight that takes the reader away from the fast-paced life too many of us live today to a slower, gentler time. I highly recommend it.
My thanks to Diane and all the folks at the On the Southern Literary Trail group for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books.
March 22, 2020
An elderly lady looks back upon her life. What can I say? I just loved this book and everyone in it. This is the second book that I have read by Wendell Berry, and so far, my favorite.
This is the story of Hannah Coulter’s life – her childhood, marriage, family, and about how life goes on. One part that truly resonated with me is her experience and pain when their children leave home. Nothing much happens in this book. No big elaborate story line or plot.
This story has reminded me to live in the present and to be thankful for all of God’s blessings. Since the story moves slowly and the themes would not be relevant to the younger reader, I would only recommend this to those who are thirty-five and older. You have to be at a certain time in your life in order to fully appreciate this.
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
“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.”
“When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world.”
This one is something that my husband and I have talked about before:
“Sometimes I imagine another young couple, strong and full of desire, coming quietly into this old house that will be empty again of all that is of any use, and will be stale and silent and dingy with dust, and they will see it shining before them as Nathan and I saw it fifty-two years ago. And I say, ‘Welcome! Love each other. Love this place and use it well. Bless your hearts.’”
“To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don’t have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder. … Maybe if you had enough children you could get used to those departures, but, having only three, I never did. I felt them like amputations. Something I needed was missing. Sometimes, even now, when I come into this house and it sounds empty, before I think I will wonder, “Where are they?”
“And what ever in their lives will they think of the old woman they will barely remember who yearned toward them and longed to teach them to know her a little and who wanted to give them more hugs and kisses than she ever was able to?”
“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.”
“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.”
“I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.”
“Grandmam was still proud of the narrowness of her waist when she was a young woman. When she married, she said, her waist had been so small that my grandfather could almost encircle it with his two hands. Now, after all her years of bearing and mothering and hard work, she had grown thick and slow, and she remembered her lost suppleness and beauty with affection but without grief. She didn’t grieve over herself. Looking me up and down as I began to grow toward womanhood, she would say, ‘Do you know your old grandmam was like you once?’ And she would smile, knowing I didn’t know it even though she had told me.”
“I think husbands pick fights with their wives sometimes just to get their attention.”
“The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.”
This is the story of Hannah Coulter’s life – her childhood, marriage, family, and about how life goes on. One part that truly resonated with me is her experience and pain when their children leave home. Nothing much happens in this book. No big elaborate story line or plot.
This story has reminded me to live in the present and to be thankful for all of God’s blessings. Since the story moves slowly and the themes would not be relevant to the younger reader, I would only recommend this to those who are thirty-five and older. You have to be at a certain time in your life in order to fully appreciate this.
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
“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.”
“When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world.”
This one is something that my husband and I have talked about before:
“Sometimes I imagine another young couple, strong and full of desire, coming quietly into this old house that will be empty again of all that is of any use, and will be stale and silent and dingy with dust, and they will see it shining before them as Nathan and I saw it fifty-two years ago. And I say, ‘Welcome! Love each other. Love this place and use it well. Bless your hearts.’”
“To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don’t have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder. … Maybe if you had enough children you could get used to those departures, but, having only three, I never did. I felt them like amputations. Something I needed was missing. Sometimes, even now, when I come into this house and it sounds empty, before I think I will wonder, “Where are they?”
“And what ever in their lives will they think of the old woman they will barely remember who yearned toward them and longed to teach them to know her a little and who wanted to give them more hugs and kisses than she ever was able to?”
“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.”
“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.”
“I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.”
“Grandmam was still proud of the narrowness of her waist when she was a young woman. When she married, she said, her waist had been so small that my grandfather could almost encircle it with his two hands. Now, after all her years of bearing and mothering and hard work, she had grown thick and slow, and she remembered her lost suppleness and beauty with affection but without grief. She didn’t grieve over herself. Looking me up and down as I began to grow toward womanhood, she would say, ‘Do you know your old grandmam was like you once?’ And she would smile, knowing I didn’t know it even though she had told me.”
“I think husbands pick fights with their wives sometimes just to get their attention.”
“The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.”
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