The Yearling

This book has made me think harder than probably any of the Pulitzer books I've read. That seems strange, doesn't it? A simple book like The Yearling hardly seems thought provoking but for me it was. It is a simple story about a young boy, Jody, who is lonely for companionship and longs to have a pet of some sort. After his father, Penny, shoots a doe, Jody rescues a fawn and makes it his own. He loves the fawn and it is his constant companion. The fawn grows up and is no long a yearling and begins to destroy the crops that Jody's family relies on for food and money so he is told he needs to go out and shoot it. Jody can't and so his mother tries and misses and just wounds him so Jody has to put the deer out of his misery. Jody runs away and grows up himself. At the end his father tells Jody that he is no longer a yearling himself but grew up while he was away.

The story is good, but it's not the part that got me thinking, it's the reading of their everyday life. Jody and his father go hunting a lot to get meat for the family. They talk a lot about what they eat on a daily basis and how they gain it and how they preserve it for the winter months. As I read along, not only did I have the desire to go out and shoot a deer and then smoke the meat, but I wondered is this how life should really be? They worked hard and they had to in order to survive. The planting and plowing were a necessity and in the end when they had a good crop it was a reward for all their hard work. They were together, Jody learned good work ethics, he learned right and wrong in the fields, and the love that he and his father had for each other was so strong because they spent this time together. Again, I wonder is this really the way life should be?

I'd like to teach my children good work ethic but I don't know how. We have a small garden ,but we don't rely on it and I can hardly get my kids to stay out there to help me weed. Maybe it's bad parenting but I can't seem to get them to want to work and to realize the importance of it. Maybe we should have a week or a month where we only rely on our garden to survive, and then we'd all die of starvation probably, I'm not that good of a gardener. I wish that my family could be together all the time, that my kids could run off in to the woods and explore and play. I wish that I spent my day doing things that my family needed so that they could be healthy and live comfortably, all with my hands. This would be a good life.

I spent a lot of time wondering this while reading this book, and decided that I'm probably romanticizing these ideas in my mind. That life would be hard and dirty. And I realize I do like to be able to run to the grocery store and buy some marinated artichoke hearts if I wanted to. I like to be able to run my dishwasher and have clean dishes and my washing machine and dryer and have clean clothes. I also like having all my teeth (something Jody's mom couldn't claim). So how do I find the balance? I guess that's something I'll have to spend my life trying to find. In the meantime, I'll dream of a life in the woods, living off the land, and working my fingers to the bone while I eat some marinated artichoke hearts.