Words&Dirt

“One night somebody asked, when is the best time in a man’s life?

Some said, it’s when you are a kid and can fool around all the time and go down to the river in the summer and play hockey on the road in the winter and that’s all you think about, fooling around and having a good time.

Or when you’re a young fellow going out and haven’t got any responsibilities.

Or when you’re first married if you’re fond of your wife and a bit later, too, when the children are just little and running around and haven’t shown any bad characteristics yet.

My father spoke up and said, ‘Now. I think maybe now.’

They asked him why.

He said because you weren’t old yet, with one thing or another collapsing on you, but old enough that you could see that a lot of things you might have wanted out of life you would never get. It was hard to explain how you could be happy in such a situation, but sometimes he thought you were.”

––Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014, by Alice Munro, pg. 390

“The sheep come crowding at me. Since they were sheared in the summer, their wool has grown back, but it is not yet very long. Right after the shearing they look from a distance surprisingly like goats, and they are not soft and heavy even yet. The big hip bones stand out, the bunting foreheads. I talk to them rather self-consciously, spreading the hay. I give them oats in the long trough.

People I know say that work like this is restorative and has a peculiar dignity, but I was born to it and feel it differently. Time and place can close in on me, it can so easily seem as if I have never got away, that I have stayed here my whole life. As if my life as an adult was some kind of dream that never took hold of me. I see myself not like Harry and Irlma, who have to some extent flourished in this life, or like my father, who has trimmed himself to it, but more like one of those misfits, captives––nearly useless, celibate, rusting––who should have left but didn’t, couldn’t and are now unfit for any place. I think of a man who let his cows starve to death one winter after his mother died, not because he was frozen in grief but because he couldn’t be bothered going out to the barn to feed them, and there was nobody to tell him he had to. I can believe that, I can imagine it. I can see myself as a middle-aged daughter who did her duty, stayed at home, thinking that someday her chance would come, until she woke up and knew it wouldn’t. Now she reads all night and doesn’t answer her door, and comes out in a surly trance to spread hay for the sheep.”

––Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014, by Alice Munro, pg. 429