Where The Crawdads Sing

Last week a package came in the traditional “plain brown wrapper.”  It was from Cohasset, Massachusettes — from my friend Barbara Canney.  I couldn’t imagine what it could be.

A book!   Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.  A volume well-read by Barbara and by the friends to whom she has loaned it.  She sent the book with these few words:  “Read and pass it on.”   I opened it and found, on the end paper, names — signatures, really — of people I didn’t know, whose very fingers must have turned these pages.  Curious, I began reading the prologue…

A Girl of the Limberlost

It’s been a long time since I literally could not put a book down.  Finally, I did, but only because Nyel needed help with something.  I was halfway finished before I even had the grace to email Barb and tell her “thank you.”

In a strange way, it reminds me of a book I found in the children’s corner of the library in this very house.  A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter.  I must have been eleven or twelve and it put into words the things I had begun to discover for myself out in the woods and on the tideflats here on the Peninsula.  Things about myself, really, and how I fit in to the greater world.

Years later when I wanted to re-read it, the Hayward librarian said it was no longer in their system.  “It’s been banned, you know,” she whispered.  When I finally got a copy and re-read it, I realized that some might call it “racist” — a part of the book that had gone right by me all those years before.  And it passed me by again.  It wasn’t the part of the book that spoke to me — the Limberlost part.  (And, I’m delighted to say I haven’t been able to find any reference to that banning online.  Was it only at the Hayward library that it had been taken off the shelves?)

A Sand County Almanac

Too, the book Barbara sent reminds me a bit of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.  In fact,  Leopold’s book is actually mentioned in Where The Crawdads Sing!  Wow!  Leopold’s book, like the others, came at a time in my life when I needed to be reminded of the world beyond my own narrow scope — the natural world that I loved and bumped up against but where, only once in a while, did I feel my place within it instead of the other way around.

Thank you, my dear friend Barbara, for knowing what would send my soul singing once again!

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