Returning Home

Life in Idaho, random acts of kindness, and Jane Austen

Auguste Renoir, The Blue River, c. 1890/1900

I have been living in Idaho for over a month now. My husband and I decided this spring that we would move to Boise, not back to Virginia, at the end of our 11 months in England. My family and I finished our time overseas at the end of July. We flew to Virginia, packed up our storage unit, and flew to Idaho with a lot of tears—tears of both sadness and gratitude. We didn’t have enough time, we felt, to say all we wanted to say, or to see all the people we wanted to see. But we did what we could, and anxiously await our next trip east.

We have now been in Boise since the beginning of August, and are thankful for everything we are getting to experience here. I was reflecting this past week on the wonders of it. My daughter needed a dress taken in, and so we went to the sweet 85-year-old woman who hemmed my wedding dress and made my veil. We spent a Sunday afternoon with my Grandpa Wally, who served his great-grandchildren a feast of treats. I got to participate in trivia night at a local brewery with my brother and his childhood best friends, who are like brothers to me. My daughters are wearing my childhood dresses as they scamper and play around my parents’ backyard today. It is a precious thing.

I have wondered how to write this life update. This is partly because, having written a whole book about leaving Idaho, it’s difficult to put into words what it feels like to return. I worry, too, that this might sound too much like a finishing chapter, or conclusion, to Uprooted. Who knows what lies in store for my family. I don’t have any assumptions about what will come next. But my husband and I are trusting that this is a good step for us at the present moment. I have learned to appreciate Wendell Berry’s words in The Art of Loading Brush:

The End of Something—history, the novel, Christianity, the human race, the world—has long been an irresistible subject. Many of the things predicted to end have so far continued, evidently to the embarrassment of none of the predictors. … None of us knows the future. Fairly predictably, we are going to be surprised by it. That is why “Take… no thought for the morrow…” is such excellent advice.

But Berry suggests that there’s a difference between predictive thought and provision-oriented thought. We ought to exercise the latter while avoiding the former:

To predict is to foretell, as if we know what is going to happen. Prediction often applies to unprecedented events: human-caused climate change, the end of the world, etc. Prediction is “futurology.” … [But] our ordinary, daily understanding seems to have accepted long ago that our capacity to see ahead is feeble. The sense of “provision” and “providing” comes from the past, and is informed by precedent.

Provision informs us that on a critical day—St. Patrick’s Day, or in a certain phase of the moon, or when the time has come and the ground is ready—the right thing to do is plant potatoes. We don’t do this because we have predicted a bountiful harvest; history warns us against that. We plant potatoes because history informs us that hunger is possible, and we must do what we can to provide against it. We know from the past only that, if we plant potatoes today, the harvest might be bountiful, but we can’t be sure, and so provision requires us to think today also of a diversity of food crops. … We can begin backing out of the future into the present, where we are alive, where we belong. To the extent that we have moved out of the future, we also have moved out of “the environment” into the actual places where we actually are living.

As I sit in my parents’ kitchen, I struggle to explain the sweetness and the struggles of returning home. But I want to live with this provision mindset—one that will enable me to move “into the actual place where [I am] living,” not with a set of assumptions or predictive determinations, but with humility and a determination to serve.

I am eager to hear your thoughts and advice on returning home, and/or moving to a new neighborhood in which you want to grow community. We’ve moved before, obviously, but it’s always different with each new move, and I’d love to learn from your wisdom.

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news + essays

• A series of recent studies suggest that random acts of kindness have unexpected power: “the people doing the kind thing consistently underestimated how much it was actually appreciated.”

• In a similar vein, David Brooks argues that “the fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life. That means being a genius at the close at hand: greeting a stranger, detecting the anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to talk across difference. More lives are diminished by the slow and frigid death of social closedness than by the short and glowing risk of social openness.”

• But Muizz Akhtar points out that “Distance and isolation are fundamentally built into the urban areas … where most of us live.” Cultivating friendships through the “social openness” Brooks describes above may require that we consider the consequences of our car-centric built environment.

• Sameer Yasir considers the life and legacy of Tulsi Gowind Gowda, a woman who has “devoted her life to transforming vast swaths of barren land in her native state of Karnataka, in southern India, into dense forests.”

• Sarah Clarkson praises the beauty and depth of George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “heroic beauty can only be won day by faithful day, tiny act by tiny generous act, the gentleness and self-giving of a lifetime creating that unhistoric beauty that changes the world.”

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Watermelon on a Plate, mid 19th century

books

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

I’ve just finished re-reading Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility alongside Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It’s been a fascinating and enjoyable process. In re-reading Jane Austen, I’ve found that her humor becomes ever more sharp, her prescient explorations of virtue and vice more convicting and encouraging. I am hoping to write up a post for paid subscribers about Sense and Sensibility and the virtue of magnanimity; stay tuned!  

On Reading Well, Karen Swallow Prior

This book has been on my to-read list for far too long. As I dog ear pages and cover every page with underlines, I can’t believe I haven’t read it sooner. In On Reading Well, Prior outlines the virtues of reading, and brilliantly considers the cardinal and Christian virtues in a classic set of texts. She explores prudence in Tom Jones, justice in A Tale of Two Cities, hope in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and temperance in The Great Gatsby. If you are a bookworm, like me, I think you’ll be delighted by this book. If you are not a bookworm, this book might convince you to become one.

events

I’m in the process of scheduling a Q&A with Bonnie Kristian, author of the soon-to-be-released work Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking our Brains! I highly recommend Kristian’s text, and hope you will join us for our conversation in October. Stay tuned for more.

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John Frederick Peto, Breakfast, c. 1890s

food & drink

• I just pulled this peach cobbler out of the oven, and it smells divine.

• At long last, we have a sourdough starter again! My kids have eaten through three (three!) of Food52’s Table Loaves in the past week and a half.

• Thanks to my sister-in-law’s recommendation, these coconut cacao black beans are a staple for our taco nights.

listening

• Speaking of Jane Austen and Karen Swallow Prior, I’ve loved listening to Prior’s “Jane and Jesus” podcast of late!