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Life in Vivid Color: Catherine Reid’s Falling into Place


Falling into Place
Catherine Reid
Beacon Press, February 2014

 

Presiding over Catherine Reid’s lyrical collection of essays, Falling into Place, is a naturalist who questions both the great web of technology and the old-fashioned policies that still dominate in twenty-first century America. Under the spell of this book, I felt as if I were entering into a truly wild world. Much like the black-and-white denizens of the film Pleasantville suddenly experiencing their lives injected with color, I, too, encountered a new world, one brimming with all the brilliance of the universe. Such is the wilderness of western Massachusetts that Reid, an MR contributor (Vol. 46 Issue 2) paints so vividly. This world is no fiction; it exists right outside the window, though it may take a while to recognize it. With climate change, pollution, and other man-made calamities of the present-day weighing heavily on her, Reid looks to the trees and the sky for respite. She presses her ears to the ground, and treads alongside rivers and ridges and hills, observing the critters, insects and birds along the way.

In the more overtly political essays of the collection, Reid sounds the alarm on conservative homophobia by recounting the difficulties she faced leading up to her own same sex marriage. Even now, Reid says, when she crosses the state line, she suddenly becomes: “an outlaw because of who I love.” Something is gravely wrong here, Reid is saying, and we should all be questioning the way our society operates. 

The author also brings a fresh voice to time-honored subjects: the death of a loved one, the search for oneself. When she writes of her dying grandmother, readers will appreciate the rich connection Reid makes to her Puritan lineage, and the struggle she faces with her queer identity in the face of family tradition. Laced into this narrative are explorations of nature, the human body, and history.

Throughout Reid draws our attention to the oddities and misfortunes of our time that put us in conflict with the natural world. She writes of Daylight Savings Time, “we jerk ourselves out of the rhythms that surround us just when the hours of sunlight seem long enough to approximate our days, just when it’s easy to sense the exact moment of sunrise.” Reid similarly seeks such rhythms in her own life—since they lead to such moments of beauty in the natural world—but finds them elusive. Of a visit to Miami, she observes:

. . . most of what I saw was artificial excess on an isolated stretch of waterfront, with little connecting the city to the rest of the United States. All seemed man-made, by artificial turf and reprocessed coral reefs, a place where people spent most of their daylight hours inside, in air kept dry and well chilled.

These twenty essays were formed by a solemn and shrewd outdoorswoman, one who balances the peculiarities of mankind against nature in its utmost perfection. Reid’s fierce loyalty to conservation land in western Massachusetts, combined with a drive to shuck off technology, brings her at times to a fairly dismissive understanding of buildings, skyscrapers, the urban sprawl, and the other things typically associated with a life in the city.

Yet it isn’t hard to warm up to Reid’s voice. By the end of this collection, readers may wonder whether it might yet be possible to disconnect their ear buds, shut off their computers, and unplug for a while—and enter the wilderness with newfound appreciation...Perhaps a return to the natural world is what we need—a walk along the nearby river, alone. After reading this collection, you will see that river with clearer eyes and hear more plainly what it has been saying all along.

Jeff Wasserboehr is a former intern for MR and a student in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at UMass-Amherst. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Passages North, Johns Hopkins's The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and the
Tulane Review.


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