Mercies Received

Since I learned to read on my own, the characters in my favorite books have provided a companionship like no other.  These folks become familiar friends, people whose stories entertain and amuse me, provide company and, just as often, comfort when I need it.  The connections I’ve felt to these characters are powerful because they reveal the universality of the human experience.  

A few weeks ago, I picked up Miss Read’s Thrush Green series to re-read a few of the novels.  I’ve a soft spot for Miss Read’s sense of humor and continued amusement at the foibles of humanity.  Both the Fairacre and Thrush Green series are among my most favorite books of all time and it’s really because they gently spoke to me when I needed it most.

I first read Thrush Green in the summer of 2006, the same year that I became a single parent.  In the first weeks after that breakup, it seemed that evidence of it was everywhere.  As I struggled to re-build my life with a 6 year-old JT, it seemed that reminders of my old existence could not be escaped.  It was painful in a way that sometimes felt unbearable.  Sleep and familiar books, two of my favorite refuges, were no longer the comforts that they had always been.  Between insomnia and the reality that some of my favorite books reminded me of a life that was now shattered, I felt adrift.

Then, in August, I picked up Miss Read’s Thrush Green, the first in a series set in a fictional Cotwolds town populated by quirky characters.  I had never read the book before.  The first novel takes place on May 1st as the residents await the arrival of the popular Curdle Fair.  Much of the story is about Ruth, who is looking after her young nephew Paul while nursing her own broken heart.  For obvious reasons, the book spoke to me and was, finally, a distraction from my own sadness.  I was hooked.  Over the course of the next year and half, I read every novel in the Thrush Green series.

In August, I picked up the Thrush Green series again.  This time, I read the books not for comfort but to spent some time with familiar friends.  As I always do, I remembered those days in 2006 when I picked up those stories and found much-needed comfort and companionship.  At the end of the first novel, Mrs. Curdle, the gypsy matriarch of the fair, looks out over town square and notes that she always feels better after a visit to Thrush Green.  I know exactly how she feels.