Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We just spent three days at our cabin, doing spring cleaning, discovering the toliet needs fixing, adjusting to the eight trees now gone due to the drought, and walking along the lake and sitting on our deck reading or playing Scrabble.  I finished the two books I was reading simultaneously:  Overstory, by Richard Powers and The Bright Light at the End of the World by Eowin Ivey.  Both are engrossing and powerful.  I think I prefer Ivey's first novel, The Snow Child to Bright Light, but the history of this book is gripping and the major character an interesting woman for her time and place.  She discovers an affinity for photography, and has her barrenness become the embracing of an art of looking still and deeply.  The Overstory also has scientific details that are factual, and the main characters in this book are trees and the people who try to save them.  I was blown away by Annie Proux's Barkskins, about the history of the decimation of the forests in North America, but this book is about now, and what is happening and going to happen when we lose our forests.  It is a passionate book, as are the human characters who come alive in relationship to trees.  Their own histories are intertwined with trees.  Reading this novel in a forest had me listening for the trees and observing them.  I also allowed myself some grieving for the loss of the firs around our cabin because of  the drought, and I stared at the stumps which  recorded the years of their lives.  The woods are my spiritual home, from the time I was a child in Virginia.  I understand better why now.