Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Late March is mud season around here and also sap time, and I must say that getting anything accomplished lately has felt like swimming through maple syrup.  So slow, but certainly not as sweet.  However I am in fact getting boatloads of things accomplished, despite feeling bogged down and even slightly stuck.  I find a way to work steadily through it all.  My island painting book is sitting before me in a new draft, one I am about to take some scissors to in an effort to edit and rearrange.  Parts of the draft are terrible, make no sense, and I will leave them on the cutting room floor, but other parts are shaping up and thus I have hope for the whole thing.  Meanwhile the color proofs for my next painting show catalogue arrived today.  The draft and color proof are here beside me now:


"Reg and I are little people.  No one ever heard of us, we have no names, we have no wealth, yet something wonderful, exciting and full of adventure happened to us."

How could you not keep reading after that?  She launches immediately into the tale of how she and her husband came to buy a lighthouse on a tiny island off Winter Harbor, west of the Schoodic peninsula.  The book chronicles their first three seasons there, during 1939, 1940, and 1941.  The war is a backdrop she barely mentions, but when she does, her descriptions are powerful and memorable.  In the book's second paragraph she says (ibid) "...at that time an unmistakable gloom was settling over the world and it was hard to understand what, if anything, the future held for us."  The lighthouse is a symbol to her of everything good in our character, but the book isn't just symbolic.  It's all about the practical work of island living and her very real joy in renovating the light tower and keeper's house, living there, and sharing the lighthouse and the island with her friends, family, and neighbors. 

It was a wonderful book to read at this particular moment.  I'd like to read her follow-up memoir, Our Island Lighthouse (Random House 1947) but don't have it on hand, and prices online run about $100 a copy, ugh.  Anyway, what I really want to read next is a little something called The Mueller Report (U.S. Government Printing Office 2019).  (I made that up.  The publishing information, not the wanting-to-read-it part.  That is real.  I would like to know, after all this time, what happened.  The truth, please, the facts.)  Instead I'm deep into the early chapters of the brand new Barry Lopez book Horizon (Knopf 2019).  It's hot off the press and I bought it last week at Bookstacks in Bucksport.  So far it's a mix of the hopeful and the hopeless, regarding nature and climate change.  His descriptions of places and experiences are so right and his writing is so generous and wide-reaching, I read along and feel as if I'm somehow brimming over.  Like our yard this afternoon, which was full of flocks of red winged blackbirds, robins, juncoes, and sparrows.  The sun is breaking through the gray sky, after a day of rain.  It's truly spring.  I thought it might never arrive, but here it is.