I finished The Sweet By and By last night. It was an excellent book! The story revolves around five women in North Carolina, each telling their own part of the story, which mostly takes place in a nursing home. Each chapter is from the perspective of one of the five women – two are “patients,” one is a nurse, one is the daughter of the nurse, and the last is the hairdresser who visits the home once a week.
Pretty much, I love books about women, and I highly recommend this one. However, I will caution that parts of it are sad and if you’re uncomfortable with the topic of getting old, you might want to skip it. Though really, I encourage you to read it anyway.
As I love books about women, especially the powerful bond between women, their friendship, and their strength, the quote below (from the perspective of the nurse’s daughter) especially struck me:
“I studied the circle of women, now encompassing my mother as one of their number, young and old, family and neighbors, perhaps single, married, widowed. It is as though they arrived on a timetable, like a flock of migratory birds, their schedule neither agreed upon in advance nor communicated, as much as felt in the subtle change of the seasons. This is simply what they do. They come. They are called to stand watch, oddly, with no male presence. It is perhaps not that the men, with few exceptions, can’t take the pain. It’s the ambiguity that they can’t abide. And there is that to be sure, endless hours of waiting. Surely these stately creatures are the same everywhere, perched around every bed where someone lies helpless. They arrive one at a time, or in pairs, and they bring smiles and stories and concerned brows and open hearts, and most of all they bring time, they have all the time in the world, poured out like water, crystalline and pure. They lower their shoulders, they place their purses on chairs, and they assume their places, familiar by instinct, either sitting or standing, circling the sick with wings of prayer and patience, protectors and mediators, watchers, slow and graceful, with the singular purpose of a great blue heron wading in shallow water, saving all effort for when it is most needed, the split second at which it catches a swimming fish in its beak, finally lifting off in flight, with no regard to the weight it carries, rising, as hope must, lighter than human breath.”
Seriously, this quote standing alone almost makes me cry, nevermind it’s relevance to the storyline. It’s beautiful. I especially love it because it’s written by a man, who obviously appreciates the power and grace of women.
The next book I’ve got on the agenda (The Center of Everything, by Laura Moriarty) is also about women, but it is kind of the opposite of The Sweet By and By as it revolves around characters much younger, who are just finding their way instead of coming to the end of it.
And since this post is extremely long, I'm going to shut up now. I hope you all are getting in plenty of good reading!
