After a day like today, when I was running from meeting to meeting, and reading so much, and moving words around, and listening and asking questions, and documenting and everything is moving so fast and so everywhichway at once and my head was so full of conversations I’d had and hadn’t had and needed to have in the future that I walked into a dang bus stop, Sarah Orne Jewitt is like a cool breeze, blowing all of that away.

Here’s a passage:

The tide was in, the wide harbor was surrounded by its dark woods, and the small wooden houses stood as near as they could get to the landing. […] The grey ledges of the rocky shore were well covered with sod in most places, and the pasture bayberry and wild roses grew thick among them. I could see the higher inland country and the scattered farms. On the brink of the hill stood a little white schoolhouse, much wind-blown and weather-beaten, which was a landmark to seagoing folk; from its door there was a most beautiful view of sea and shore. The summer vacation now prevailed, and after finding the door unfastened, and taking a long look through one of the seaward windows, and reflecting afterward for some time in a shady place near by among the bayberry bushes, […] I hired the schoolhouse for the rest of the vacation at fifty cents a week.

In my mind, I remembered the whole book like this: lusciously descriptive passages of beautiful word pictures of coastal Maine, illustrative of Laura Ingalls Wilder describing the beauty of the prairie.

But, as I re-perused it again tonight, searching for the perfect passage to share with you, to ignite your curiosity, dear reader, for the writing of Sarah Orne Jewitt – she was one of Willa Cather’s favorites – I realized that yes, this book, does contain passages like the one above. In fact, many chapters start with a paragraph like that, but then they go on to tell stories about the people of Maine, framing up Jewitt’s stories of those people in her own experiences, and then merging into the stories as the people tell them, themselves.

And, in that way, they remind me of the later books of the Anne of Green Gables series, when she meets people and they tell her their stories, and she becomes involved in their lives, during the summer breaks of her time a Queens, and later when Anne is a mother and tells the stories of the people in her town, before WWI steals her sons away.

So, as things get tense at work, at home, in the news over the next days, weeks, and (god help us) months, escape into a time and a place when life was simpler, the air was clean, the flowers bloomed in the grass, and the ships on the sea disappeared into the horizon.