FF Friday

patience & sarah by isabel miller

it's a story about two frontier women - an educated, witty painter patience, stifled in her brother's unloving house somewhere in the middle of judgemental, bible-belt-y rural america, and sarah the farmer, raised by her father as something of a honorary boy in duties and responsibilities and juust a bit of freedom. they find each other, and they fall in love - of course - and it's terrifying and hard and at once easier than they expected, and once there's this love, allowed, they can afford to love the rest of the world as well, to watch it for kindness and hope. starts and stops and broken attempts - sarah offers the flight but patience is afraid, sarah returns and is content to deal with breadcrumbs, but patience teaches them to get everything - and growing up, and learning themselves and the others, and the world around them is so wavering and unsettled into itself there's acceptance alongisde with censure, and possibilities, and hope, and hope, and hope.

i loved it so much - i'm startled by this book because i did not expect it, and i kind of fell into it the way you fall asleep in the garden, somewhere - and it's so beautiful, that creating of the language on the fly when your old one doesn't have the words needed, the concepts, the joy. oh, ah, this journey, this home.

So when I let my head fall back under Sarah’s kiss, the frenzy I trembled at just wasn’t there. Instead, comfort and joy and simplicity and order and answers to questions I’d always supposed unanswerable, such as, why was I born? why a woman? why here? why now?
A wonderful glowing spacious peacefulness came to us. There was so much time.