Gladys Tabor’s Wry Yankee Wit

Gladys Tabor was a beloved writer of my mother’s generation. She had a homely, yet penetrating way of observing her small world filled with common daily chores. That is one of the things we can love about her writing… and some things are quite true in any generation it seems… which is what makes for good writing. People still love her books Stillmeadow Road and Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge.

enjoy:

In our part of the country, nobody is ever quite sure where the boundaries of the land are. Old fences, long since gone, or gray rocks, or a certain dead chestnut tree, or a brook which may have changed its course, these mark the edge of one’s property. Now and then a surveyor may scramble around a day or so and deliver an expensive piece of paper, but the farm folk go right back on using the woodland or picking the grapes where they always have, and this is as it should be. We do not own the land, the land owns us. The survey we had when we wanted to turn over land to George for his house was like a Christmas present, for it turned out we had considerably more than forty acres, enough to let William,George’s brother, have a house too.

Once in a while I try to picture what life in the country might have been if George and William had not lived right across the road, and then I know the main thing in buying an old house in the country is to settle near good neighbors. The natives on our valley are not the quaint folk so many writers talk about; the only quaint folk around here are the few city week-enders, and some of them are quaint enough for any fiction.

The color for October is pink due to Breast Cancer awareness. I think Tabor found just the insight for pink:

“Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too” ~Gladys Taber

When someone reviewed her book, ‘Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge‘, they described it this way:
“The two women writing to each other here are great friends, share a deep love of country (call themselves ‘countrywomen’) and aren’t embarrassed to savor the smallest available joys.” Made me feel that that is something like Joanne and I …only I am very poor at dependably writing hard copy letters. but we are “countrywomen” for sure… in the best sense of being in touch with the earth and rejoicing in its gifts to us.

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