My book group has chosen for our first book this fall,  “Rules of Civility,” by Amor Towles. You may know him as the author of  “A Gentleman in Moscow,” but “Rules of Civility” was his debut novel. I have read it already, read it shortly after I read “A Gentleman in Moscow” and here’s the deal. 

I didn’t like it. 

It is set in the late 1930s in New York City, and not my favorite setting for a novel, especially as I was able to spend so much time with the Count in the Metropol Hotel, gazing at the Kremlin across the way when we got bored. So, “Rules of Civility” just fell flat. But here’s another deal. 

This time, I love it. 

It is as if I never read it the first time.  Nothing is familiar to me and I am underlining and highlighted passages like I am to be tested on it, and it a great read.  How is this so?  Well, it just is. 

I enjoy re-reading my favorite books.  “The Great Gatsby”  for example.  I suspect teachers require it because, as classics go, it isn’t too big.  I’ve read it three times, at different phases of my life, and it was a different book each time.  If you haven’t read it in a while, return to it, and you will see what I mean. 

My grandmother was an avid reader.  She brought home stacks of novels and history books, always returning them before they were due.  She didn’t want a blemish on her permanent record. In her 80s she began checking out books she had read years before.  She had forgotten most of the book, forgotten, even, that she had read it, and as far as she was concerned this was such a good thing.  She got to enjoy it all over again. 

I have read, and re-read, Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Her “White Album,” too.  Both are collections of essays set in the 1960s, an era I was influenced by, but too young to take an active part in. I will remember an image, a snippet of a well-turned phrase, and off I go to find the book.

It then lies about for a month or more, and before I return it to its home, I have read everything in it.

My pal, Alice, rereads books all the time.  If you could see her collection, you would know what a thing this is.  When she finishes a book, she writes in pencil on the last page, her name, the date and time.  I love this but would never be consistent enough to do it. 

She re-reads Michener.  Michener, I say.  She recently purchased “The Drifters” and sent it to my Kindle—did you know you can do this?  Also a Michener, but one I would actually read. It took place in the 60s and followed a band of disenchanted youth across continents. I loved every page I didn’t actually turn.

I am already looking forward to a week at the beach, maybe two, when I have forgotten enough to enjoy it again. 

I read “The Miniaturist” on a long flight home from Europe, and then finished it off at home. I loved it so much, I would like to read it again before I start the sequel, “The House of Fortune.”  It arrived last week from Waterstones, and is one of the prettiest books I have ever seen.  I can’t re-read my copy of “The Miniaturist”, though. Alice has it, read it, and can’t give it back.  She says she can’t explain it, but once she reads a book, it is as if they have bonded, Alice and the book, and to my face she said, you will not be seeing this again. 

I have to admire her honesty, and I have offered to get her own copy, but no, it isn’t the same, apparently.  She has probably already penciled in her name, the date and time.  I get it, sort of, but no, not really. 

About the only book I loved but could not read again was “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”  I tried, but as I read the first few pages the intricate and intriguing plot twists spooled out in front of me and there was no going back to a fresh beginning. 

Maybe in my eighties I will see it at the library.  Pull it down from the shelf, as my grandmother did, and think, oh, this looks interesting. Get a nice young person to help me carry it to my car.  It’s a big old book.  But not as big as a Michener.

We needed the rain. All across Kentucky we needed the rain, especially after baking so in the early days of July, those days of withering heat.  And then we got it. 

Our friends in Eastern Kentucky were swept away by it, four children ripped from their parents as they clung to a tree and each other.  And they were gone, four sweet babies swirled away and their parents’ anguished cries echo, sweeping our anguish along in a choke of fellow feeling.  Because how can we think of such a thing and not imagine our own babies, our own feeble arms trying to hold on.

Numbers of loss of life climb.  Over thirty, and we hold our breath, for there will be more. 

The Appalachian Writers Workshop was going on last week when the rains came. Troublesome Creek lived up to her name, over-washed her banks. Sweeping away cars, roaring now, illuminated only by lighting strikes. The water kept rising, rushing, threatening all the low places.  

“Come a tide” Appalachians would say.

It rained and rained, Troublesome rose and rushed, and by the middle of the night, with no electricity or water, writers were jostled from their sleep to head for higher ground, until all who could safely get there huddled on the porch of Stuckey, a cottage that was first a hospital for the settlement school. They wondered with worry about their friends on the other side of the creek, with no way to reach them. 

I know all this, not because I was there, but because so many of my friends were, and I’ve heard stories.  I’ve seen their pictures and videos. Go to the Hindman Settlement School Facebook page and you can see them, too. 

The sun rose on devastation. While buildings were still standing, the flood waters wreaked havoc, destroying offices, meetings rooms, and especially heartbreaking, the archives. 

Looking at it, one wonders how it will ever be made right. Over the weekend and even now, volunteers are sifting through old pictures, letters, correspondence—the documents that help create and preserve a living place—with experts guiding them in preservation.  

My friend, Silas, sent a photo of a photo from the early 1900s, an image of a straight-backed woman in a doorway, a dulcimer in her lap, her hair piled in the fashion of the day. Flood waters and mud have done their best to ruin her, but, even so, we still get a sense of her, the time and place, though streaks of scratches dull her, we know her, even so. 

He said he saved this one, but so many beauties like her were lost. 

He spent the day, and so many others did, volunteering.  He worked the archives, unloaded flats of water, sweltered on the campus that started his writing career. 

You don’t have to be a writer to have a connection to Hindman,  If you have read “The Dollmaker,” and loved it, you have a connection.  Harriet Arnow was a pillar of the writing workshop for years.  If you adore Wendell Berry, you have a connection,  He is a great friend of the place. As is Lee Smith.  If you own and play a mountain dulcimer, you have a connection to Eastern Kentucky, if you have sent supplies to Red Bird Mission, you are connected.  

It was surely impossible to escape the devastation of the flood waters for folks from Hindman.  Family, friends displaced and homes destroyed.  But even so, the staff at the settlement school set up emergency housing for the community, provided hot meals cooked in a makeshift kitchen—grills in the parking lot—feeding and caring for anyone who wanders up and needs food and water and, there is no other word for it, love. 

Hindman and the settlement school aren’t the only ones who have suffered.  And right now, before FEMA funds kick in, before insurance pays out, our friends in Appalachia need our help.  We have so many outlets and ways to help right now.  

I invite you to go to the Hindman Settlement School and donate through  Hindman Flood Relief.  Funds are used for immediate clean up and the provision of cleaning supplies, food, shelter for the displaced.  Appalshop, that wonderful program, suffered greatly from the flooding too, and they have a Flood Support tab you can use to donate.  Buckhorn Home, too, suffered damage and their website provides a place to donate.

There are other outlets, too. 

This is something we can do, right now, knowing what we give will be used tomorrow, or the next day to ease suffering, to bring some hope, to save just one more photo, diary, little scrap of history. 

Thank you for helping. 

My grandmother wanted to picnic on the grounds.  It is all she talked about, Decoration Day out on the blowing prairie of east Oklahoma, the day her family met at the cemetery on the outskirts of town, which was hardly a town. They decorated graves, which meant, first they pulled weeds, but only after standing around a bit, as you do, in any cemetery where your people are buried. 

You stand, you look down, maybe gaze off into the middle distance, look down again.  Decoration Day, Memorial Day, birthday, maybe, or Christmas, whenever you visit, this is what you do. 

The Paxton clan would not have been alone out there in Fair View Cemetery. Other families would be working and picnicking on the grounds, too.  Nothing my grandmother liked better than a picnic, in a Talala, Oklahoma cemetery or in her own backyard. 

Can you imagine for just a moment, a family up at Elmwood, quilts spread out, unwrapping sandwiches, soda cans tipping over in the grass, someone with a butcher knife and a watermelon?  

Well, we couldn’t either, even as children, and we did our best to  ignore her when she talked in that wistful way about picnics and gravestones, because it was the only power we had. 

We showed up, not with picnic baskets, but tubs of peonies, iris, flowers cut from the yard. A watering can to fill at the pump with the red handle, that one there, by the road.  We wandered around while my mother worked, while my grandmothers worked, but the job was soon done. We went early in the morning, dew still clinging to blades of grass, and home in time for lunch.

But I can’t remember if we decorated the graves exactly on Memorial Day.  It seems we must have, returning later in the week to collect the vases, discard the dead flowers.  But maybe not. 

So, this is my question.  Is it tradition to decorate on Memorial Day or for Memorial Day?  It hasn’t bothered me until recently. 

After my grandmothers died and my mother was sole proprietress of the Memorial Day ritual, we began visiting Elmwood on Saturday before the holiday.  Early morning calls made the rounds, and whoever wanted to tag along, did.  For a while we still fooled around with fresh flowers but Daddy was a menace with the lawnmower and eventually the yard was bare. 

Mother began to regret the expense of bought flowers, so she bought, instead, flowering plants she could retrieve later and use in her planters.  Now my sister and I do the same.  We dig little divots to hid the price tags on the pots, nestle them into the grass, and worry they won’t be there when we return. 

But, of course, they are. 

We go on Saturday and reclaim therm on Monday, the holiday itself, before the day gets too hot and they wilt beyond reviving. But on Monday, Memorial Day, I see an elderly couple walking gingerly, he has her elbow, she has a fistful of flags. They walk at an incline, an arrangement sitting on the hood of their car, they will have to make two trips. There are lots of car trunks gaping open, gardening activity around stones even though Elmwood is supposed to be perpetual care. And I am driving by to get our potted plants, to take them home after their scant time in memoriam, and I wonder if I have the protocol wrong. 

Even when I was young I got the sense of putting flowers on the graves was more a duty, if not a chore. Not an onerous chore, but one my mother was always iffy about when we should go, what we should take, who’s going with her. There was always some hemming and hawing. 

Now Kathy and I do the graves,  and we hem and haw, too, never very excited. but coming around to the task once we crest the hill at Elmwood.  

I can never find the Skillmans, my mother’s parents, even though they are not five yards from the McDonoughs.  There is one spot left, by my Granny Opal, and I want it. I stand in the empty space and admire what will be my view.  Then, Kathy and I decide to visit other cemeteries, other family.  It isn’t the prairie or a picnic lunch, but it takes all day and we are glad.