Because I know the minimalist lifestyle is the right thing to do, and to know your colors is to know yourself, but every so often I want to not know a thing or two about who I am and what I’m all about and so I go to the library because it is in the library that I can make a tower of choices and personalities and carry them out into the world with me. Sometimes I don’t want to return them on time. Such was the case with Erin A. Craig’s Small Wonders.
Because “eggs as yellow as sunshine and freckled with cracked black pepper” is a delicious phrase and I want to write like that, and also this is how I like my eggs, and Small Favors is a tale filled with danger and mystery and blood but Craig gives us sunshine eggs and cracked pepper, honeycakes, and four-leaf clovers and I think there is evil in the world, but there are these things, too – small favors, maybe – and I think it’s good to pay attention to both.
Because a boy – a beautiful boy – steps out of the forest, the one Ellerie (the main character) isn’t supposed to go into, and the scene when they first meet is flirtatious and scary and I sat up a little straighter and read a little longer and here is the point when I knew Small Favors would be late. The choices I’ve made regarding work and motherhood and marriage and friendship have made it so I think I can’t go into the woods all that much. The rules and regimens I’ve set for myself at times get misinterpreted. At times I think if I am tending to all these things – and tending to them well – then I can write. Then I am good. Writing means going into the woods. It has always meant going into the woods, but when I hold my life and all that’s in it as a series of objects that need protecting then I equate writing – going into the woods – as dangerous, as something bad. Only bad people write. Small Favors is late because I needed Ellerie to go into the woods.
Because Ellerie, who says, “My place in the world was nebulous, a malleable concept given definition by the space I occupied,” names the boy because he won’t give her his real name. She names him Whitaker, for the trees – the white furs – that stand tall behind him when he walks out of the forest to talk to her. “They grow over a hundred feet tall, and their branches are thickest at the base, covering the forest floor. Without a path, it would be almost impossible to walk through…[they are] completely impenetrable. Just like you.” Ellerie names him because she believes important things have names, and Ellerie, whose identity and definition take on the space she occupies takes the job of Adam and names what she sees, what is important, what she refuses to turn away from.
Because one morning when I was reading, a spider moved along the wall next to me and I was not creeped out and I did not kill her because I’ve read Charlotte’s Web and I am startled and in awe of spiders, but I am no longer afraid of them. Bees are on the outside and inside of Small Favors. I hold them every time I read the book and I hoped Craig would do for the bees what EB White did for spiders, and the morning I read, it was still dark save for the light above my reading chair, and I know when spiders sense light, when they believe they are exposed, they freeze but that morning the spider kept moving even though the light shone right on her. Even though we were close enough surely she could feel me breathing and feel the wind from the turn of the pages. But she kept on moving and I knew she was not afraid.
Because the town Ellerie lives in is called “God’s Grasp,” and something horrifying happens to Ellerie’s mom and the only way she has a chance to heal is if she leaves God’s Grasp, and I think anyone who believes they are in the grasp of anyone or anything can’t do all that much. Whitaker thinks so too. He tells Ellerie, “There’s so much more beyond God’s Grasp,” and it’s a startling concept: to heal, to see, one must leave what it is that’s been made and ordered for them. But so is the idea of being in the grasp of God, and again I’m thinking of Eve and whether or not the snake might’ve said something to this effect. Life in this town was horrifying for Ellerie and it turns out Whitaker is a sort of monster, but he loves Ellerie and it is because of his love that he wants to be something different – someone different. And Ellerie loves him too, and it is because of her love for him that she can set him free of the monstrous bondage he’s under.
Because I finished the book in a hotel in Indianapolis, on a still dark Sunday morning after dropping off Harper at a major university to warm up for a swim meet, and when I walked into our hotel room with her not in it, I got the vacant and scared feeling I sometimes feel when my children are around and then they are not; when we’ve marked a place together, we’ve made a memory in a place just by living in it and through it together and now they’re not there and sometimes when this happens I get so overwhelmed I cannot move, so I picked up Small Favors and I went into the forest with Ellerie – into the woods – where she was warned never to go but it is into the woods and away from God’s Grasp that she must go in order to create a new thing; in order to live.
Into the woods and then beyond them. Into the dark and then out again.
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