Where I’ve been.

 
    A while back, most of our family stole away for a week in a cabin in the woods. I took my computer along, and used some of the time to finish up a novel, but that was out of the way in a couple of days and it went back in the bag.
    With no internet service, I did not check my e-mail for more than a week. As near as I can tell, nobody missed me. Cell phone service was spotty, but since I am one of the last men standing without one of the infernal machines, I hardly noticed.
    We visited a few Old West historic sites, and did some sightseeing. And we did a lot of sitting around, which was nice. A bull moose stopped by one day and hung out in the back yard for a couple of hours. The black bear who visited another evening chose not to stay.
    It was good to get away. Most of the plans we’d made for the year got canceled for safety’s sake, so it was nice to find a safe place to spend a different kind of time together—and alone.

My Favorite Book, Part 22.

Wendell Berry is, and always has been, more committed to doing things right than in doing them quickly, or efficiently. If he is still farming in Kentucky at his advanced age, he will be farming with horses, as he has done throughout his life.

And when he writes, he writes in longhand, with a pencil.

He writes poetry. He writes insightful and challenging essays. And he writes fiction. All of it is worth reading. Not quickly, but attentively, and thoughtfully.

Most of his fiction is about a made-up, but true, place called Port William, Kentucky. It is a farming community; a close-knit agglomeration of people, all with stories worth hearing. As much as his novels and stories are about people, they are about place, and how people and places are connected, and how those connections make our lives, and create the communities and world we live in.

A Place on Earth is but one of many novels about Port William, this one set during World War Two. In its pages, you meet—more than meet, become acquainted with—many of the families and individuals of Port William of that day; families and people whose pasts and futures populate other Port William novels.

There is one passage in A Place on Earth that seems to me to speak of the curious times we are living in today: “The life of the house will change, accommodate itself to the needs of the new life, and then in a few days the new will be learned, what once was unexpected will become a habit—and they will go on as before.”