indiana territory

Harvesting the Heart - Jodi Picoult

I walked down the truncated book aisle at our Wal-Mart and saw this book by Jodi Picoult, who wrote My Sister's Keeper, dontcha know. I took it down from the shelf and saw that it was about a young mother and motherhood and I thought, "Oh, not for me." Still, I opened it and starting reading a passage on page 234:

My father stood up and walked to the window. "When I was very little and we were livin' in Ireland, my own father used to cut the fields three time each summer for haying. He had an old tractor, and he'd start on one edge of the field, circlin' tighter and tighter in a spiral until he almost got dead center. Then my sisters and I would run into the grass that still stood and we'd chase out the cottontails that had been pushed to the middle by the tractor. They'd come out in a flurry, the lot of them, jumpin' faster than we could run. Once - I think it was the summer before we came over here - I caught one by the tail. I told my da I was going to keep it like a pet, and he got very serious and told me that wouldn't be fair to the rabbit, since God hadn't made it for that purpose. But I built a hutch and gave it hay and water and carrots. The next day it was dead, lyin' on its side. My father came up beside me and said some things were just meant to stay free." He turned around and faced me, his eyes brilliant and dark. "That," he said, "is why I never went lookin' for your mother."

I swallowed. I wondered what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands, something bejewelled and treasured and know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees. "Twenty years," I whispered. "You must hate her so much."

"Aye." My father stood and grasped my hands. "At least as much as I love her."

There in the aisle of store of life's details, part of me - the part that I know best - could slip into what the words had said, as if there were not billions of other people on the planet. My feelings were big, like they took up all the space everywhere, as if they were everything.

I didn't want to put the book back and get it from the library. I wanted to have those words where I could just rest my hands on the cover when I walked by a table and saw it. Where it would be a touchstone for that which I feel deeply.

And so I bought it.

posted by Jody @ 12:08 PM