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| Available in print or as a PDF from lulu.com |
We stopped in at the Brooktondale General Store a few weeks ago, a delightful spot, and split a fine sandwich and beer off their chalkboard choices. Up by the front window there was a shallow stack of books, and as soon as I picked one up and flipped a few pages I knew it fit into my day as sure as the lunch we just finished.
The book is Intersections, by Susan C. Larkin; a genuine and perceptive "local" book and author-resident. It is the kind of book I wish I had the nerve and vision to write about my own experience in a rural community. The premise is straightforward: a series of interviews with her neighbors on two intersecting roads about the reasons for enjoying living where they do. The interview are capationed by large lush black & white photographs by the author which are reason enough to cherish the book.
Without any editorializing on her part, the beauty of the book is how the responses to her few questions reveal the abiding close-felt, common passions of all her neighbors even as the economic and life-style differences between them are easily understood. But it is the sincerity of the voices and the honest attachment to this particular place where they live that makes small potatoes of what might have fallen to inflammatory social fireworks in a lesser book - a testament to the author and her neighbors, both.
I found it to be a gently told, but profound book of lessons; reinforcing what we ourselves have found in 45 years in this one place - wants are basically simple; love, enough, and a home in the world.