Beautiful and emotional stories if you give them the time and quietness they deserve.
After starting this short story collection I made the mistake of never giving myself enough time to read quietly. But snacking on snippets from time to time lead to never really emotionally connecting with the stories. And these stories have a lot of potential for intertwining with thoughts and feelings about your own life. Gifting you the perspectives and words of a wise woman. When I recognized I was dragging my feet on this book around a third of the way through, I chose to do better.
The older I grow the more I come to appreciate Ursula's stories. I think I might have just been too inexperienced in life when I read some of her earlier short story collections, like Orsinian Tales. It makes me excited for re-reading her books in the future. I'm particularly savoring the moment I can read the Earthsea cycle to my children (if it ever comes to that).
Again Ursula starts her book with a hand drawn map. A map of the fictional Klatsand, Oregon, where all these stories take place. It's a beautiful way of shaping worlds. Something I also instinctively did when I was a child. But it's especially beautiful because Ursula then goes on to imagine so richly and thoughtfully.
Below are some of the thoughts I'd jotted down in the margins and the phrases I'd underlined.
True love
Such a nice and powerful story enforcing a woman's individuality. Why are men so often entirely different beasts; without tact or any capacity to imagine women as anything other than a lesser creature?
Sleepwalkers
Rapid fire portraits of the people staying in the Hannah's Hideaway motel. Everyone here is crazy. Only the maid, Ava, is considered normal by the story. But she's run away from a husband who shot their daughter. Fleeing with her son. The most vulnerable is the morally purest in Ursula's story.
Quoits
This story came close to what I recently went through with my father's death. Though it also beautifully sketches the struggle of a non-heteronormative relationship in a society that's still intolerant to those.
She and Barbara had seen the stone places on their two-week walking tour of Dorset and Cornwall—their honeymoon, Barbara had called it once but only once, after which they had agreed not to use the wrong names just because there were no right ones.
"Angus doesn't seem to need to name things, the way I do. I wish I didn't, but I do."
"It's a hard habit to quit," Shirley said
Hernes
A story of four generations of women, told in snippets from all four, criss-cross through time. Allowing us to slowly piece together the lives that unfolded. And it gives such a powerful emotional understanding of the weight of all that came before for every single moment in the present. The women take their own individuality and the story never really brings a man into the center of its weight. The men are only secondary, while the effect of men is painfully present. Painting the immaturity of men the way Ursula does, makes the story feel like it entrusts you with the inter-generational whispers between women.
But this is water of the sea, brewed, imbued, souped up with life and life's dying and decaying. It is tainted, it is profoundly impure. It is the mother-fluid, the amniotic minestrone.
Once when they were upstairs in the world, Persephone's daughter slipped away. She needed a light foot and a quick eye, for the mother and grandmother never let her out of their sight; but they were busy in the garden, in the kitchen, planting, weeding, cooking, canning, all the housekeeping of the world.
I'm not a tree. I tried to breathe nitrogen in and oxygen out, like trees do, I tried to be your elm tree, but I got the Dutch elm blight. I'm going to die if I go on trying to live here. I can't live on what you breathe out. I can't make your oxygen any more. I'm sick, I'm afraid of dying, I'm sorry that puts a strain on our relationship!
I thought she was wrong to let Lily have her way, wrong to have the child, wrong to come here to live, but I guess we think when a woman's free she's wrong.