On smallish dogs and Small Wonder

The cracks in the ground are so wide and deep that Zack stepped in one and fell down.  (I laughed).
And I read,

                                                                                  Kingsolver's Small Wonder


It's an odd coincidence that I'm reading these essays on the twelfth anniversary of the 911 attacks and she began writing them immediately after the attacks.  They are still as urgent now as they were then--maybe more so. And it is still as true as ever that the people who ought to be reading this book, aren't.

She has so many ways to make the point--
     The biggest weapons we'll ever build cannot ever really make us safe.

Or, more to the point--
     As our war drives a population into refugee status, immense waves of  new recruits are entering schools in Pakistan ... to train to a lifelong vow of vengeance against America.  One, somewhere, is just a boy, the age of my younger child.  Today that child and mine enter new lifetimes as hater and hated, and the door locks behind us all.

I hope I'm not quoting a passage that the author believes to be one of the weaker ones of the book--I don't think there were any weak passages.  And I hope I'm not misleading any potential readers that the book is a dry diatribe against war.  Far from it! It's about life, love, motherhood, pain, growing up...it's an eternal reminder that life is precious, all of it--why should we waste the world we have been given?  Cherish it.

My words are what's weak.  All I should be saying is that I especially loved the essays "Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen" and "Letter To My Mother". My daughter and I are like her and her mother in heart-rending ways--I was the shy introvert with an crippling fear of failure, yet somehow my daughter turned out brave, confident, and gregarious.  And I can't take the credit for it.

"Letter To My Mother" is one I wished I had written.  The events in this story are true.  Names have been changed to protect the innocent. So true for me and my mother, in vastly different times and places, that we did eventually come to understanding and deep forgiveness.  We all hate our mothers, for a while, but some of us are lucky enough to get over it.

One odd thing, Barbara Kingsolver is only three years older than me, but in the ways she describes her coming of age against a "woman's place in the world", she seems to have grown up in a different generation.  It's as though she was a woman of the sixties, but me, of the eighties.

If you're a woman our age,pick up the book and read those two essays and see if you agree.  I'd be curious to know.   Even if you choose to read nothing else.
(You won't!)