Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

My father died at high noon on the Spring Equinox, a time of earthly balance when day and night are everywhere the same. The following is a tribute... Written March 20, 1998: I have emerged from the shadow of my father’s death.   A year has passed, 365 days of darkness.   The noon sun of the Spring Equinox rises high—illuminating memories of the comet Hale Bopp streaking across a night sky one year ago.   My soul had no heart for spring last year.   I found no joy in the spiraling call of the red-tailed hawk, in the raw-boned bucks of the new calves, nor in the straight-up leaps of the long-legged lambs.   My spirit dwelt in sadness—stayed anchored to the twin calf lying frozen beneath a snowdrift, reached inside this dark place of loss as I had reached inside the dying ewe, my hand as desperate to pull life from her womb as I had been to draw meaning from my father’s last breath.   Neither was within my grasp. A new spring has arrived....

When the four-year-old daughter of Frank Bures, contributing editor to Poets & Writers , asked him to tell her about the sad and scary parts of his life, he did.   As a writer and editor he understood the power of narrative, yet he didn’t understand why his daughter listened so intently to every story “as if her life depended on it.”   And then he realized she was really asking, How do you live in a world with sadness and fear? And how can I? He tells this anecdote in his article “ The Secret Lives of Stories: Rewriting Our Personal Narratives ” ( P&W, Jan/Feb issue, 2013).   He points out that the underlying, utilitarian reason humans are hardwired to tell stories might be because our survival depends on knowing WHAT CAUSES WHAT—a skill even the most sophisticated computer does not yet have.   In Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder tells about trying to write a war memoir about the time he spent...