medicalhwa.blogg.se

In Crosby, Maine you’ll find characters dealing with loneliness, infidelity, alcoholism, sickness, aging, death, regrets, so many regrets.

Olive is a survivor, and on “a glorious autumn … he world sparkled, and the yellows and reds, and orange and pale pinks, were just splendid … and every morning when she opened the door she was aware of the beauty of the world.” So, too, has Miss Strout opened a door for us onto the beauty of Crosby’s world. She did not know who she was, or what would happen to her.” … She realized it was as though she had - all her life - four big wheels beneath her, without even knowing it, of course, and now they were, all four of them, wobbling and about to come off. Helen’s drunken fall leads to an inner peace for all when honesty overcomes hostility.Īfter her heart attack, Olive felt “this gaping bright universe of loneliness that she faced. Jim, who has made a fortune as a lawyer in New York, would like to live in Crosby, but Helen cannot bear the small town. The encounter is a disaster the women dislike one another Bob yearns for New York (and his ex-wife) but Margaret hates the city. Olive is barely mentioned in “Exiles.” Brothers Jim and Bob were the central characters in Miss Strout’s “The Burgess Boys.” With their wives, Helen and Margaret, they are getting together in Crosby where Bob and Margaret live, after Jim and Helen drop off their grandson at camp. When Olive overhears her daughter-in-law yell at her grandson, she feels this was an opening “into the darkness of a relationship one saw by mistake, as if inside a dark barn, the door had been momentarily blown off and one saw things not meant to be seen.” The children refuse to talk to, or even look at, her. In “Motherless Child,” Olive’s son, Christopher, and his family come to visit. After her move to the Maple Hill Apartments, in the story “Friend” she meets Isabelle, a character from Miss Strout’s first novel, “Amy and Isabelle.” The two old women laugh together as they are bound by the iniquities of old age. In “Light,” she visits Cindy, a young woman undergoing cancer treatment they bond over the beauty of February light. In “Labor,” her caustic comments and thoughts during a baby shower are interrupted when circumstances require her to deliver a guest’s baby, an event that surprises even her no-nonsense self. As the seasons progress from summer to winter and the years pass, Jack dies, Olive has a heart attack and eventually she is forced to move into the Maple Hill Apartments, a retirement community.